REMINISCENCES 



OF 



FOREIGN TRAVEL. 



a ifragment of autolii'ograpi^i?* 



BY 

ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 



PRIVATELY PRINTED. 

1894. 



/ 



/^ 






Copyright, 1894, 
Bt John Wilson and Son. 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



1\ /f ANY of these Reminiscences were written long 
ago, and then laid aside for future consideration. 
Finding them during the past winter with other almost 
forgotten papers, I have occupied myself in adding to 
this little fragment of autobiography, in order to print 
it privately for my grandchildren and a few surviving 
friends. I am sensible that portions of it may seem 
egotistical, but this is the privilege of an octogenarian. 
At all events, the task has helped me through some of 
those weary hours which press with increasing heavi- 
ness upon one who is now within a few weeks of 
entering upon his eighty-sixth year. 



EGBERT C. WINTHROP. 



90 Marlborough Street, Boston, 
April 19, 1894. 



A FRAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 



A VALUED literary friend, to wboin I once sent 
-^^^ the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical 
Society on the Centennial Anniversary of the birthday 
of Sir Walter Scott, said to me in his note of acknow- 
ledgment, " I wish that you would prepare for publica- 
tion, now, or when we have paid too high a price for 
knowledge, your recollections of the distinguished 
men of both hemispheres whom you have known." 
It was not the first time that such a suggestion had 
been made to me ; but it was the first time that I 
seriously entertained it, and resolved to make, sooner 
or later, an effort to comply with it. I am by no means 
sure, however, that the effort is worth making, or that 
I shall succeed in jotting down anything worthy of re- 
membrance. But I may at least occupy a leisure hour, 
from day to day, pleasantly and not unprofitably, in 
living over again some of the scenes through which I 
have passed, abroad or at home, and in bringing back to 
my remembrance, partly by the aid of old journals and 
letters, some of the eminent persons whom I have met 
more or less intimately, in other lands or in my own, 
but so few of whom I can meet again on earth. 

I prefer to begin with those whom I have known in 
foreign countries, because they are fewer in number 

1 



A FRAGMENT 



and my account of them will thus be briefer; and 
when I have once dealt with these, I shall feel that I 
have finished one part of my story, and perhaps be 
more ready to turn to the other and longer part. 

Crossing the Atlantic for the first time in April, 1847, 
I visited London with some peculiar advantages for 
seeing the English celebrities of that day. I was a 
member of Congress, and during the six or seven years 
I had been at Washington I had served for a part of 
the time on the Committee of Foreign Affairs. I had 
thus been brought into official as well as personal 
association with members of the Diplomatic Corps in 
Washington, more than one of whom, without solicita- 
tion, gave me letters of introduction. Mr. Webster, 
too, on learning that I was going abroad, sent me 
several valuable letters to friends in England ; and Mr. 
Everett, who had recently returned from there after a 
four-years residence as our Minister in London, sent 
me a number of introductions of the most desirable 
character. Meantime Mr. Bancroft, who was then our 
Minister in England, was a personal though not at that 
time a political friend, and he was fuU of the kindest 
attentions on my arrival. 

My very first day in London was one to be marked 
with white chalk. Calling without delay to see the 
Lyells, whom I had known intimately in Boston while 
Sir Charles was delivering his first course of Lowell 
Institute Lectures, ^ he said at once to me : " I cannot 
let you sit down an instant. You must go with me 

1 Lady Lj'ell was a far removed connection of mine, and we soon 
resolved to shorten the distance and count ourselves cousins for life. 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 6 

without a moment's delay to the Royal British Institu- 
tion. Faraday delivers the closing lecture of his 
course in a few minutes ; and you may never have 
another opportunity of hearing him." So off we hurried 
to Albemarle Street, where we found Faraday already 
on the platform, just about to commence one of those 
charming lectures on Chemistry, or Electro-Chemistry, 
which gave so much delight and instruction to all who 
heard him. I cannot venture, after such a lapse of 
time, to give the precise topics of his lecture, — unhap- 
pily, I made no notes of it ; but I remember well the 
sweetness and the power of his manner and delivery, 
and the exquisite ease and grace of his experiments. 
Tyndall, in his memoir of Faraday, says : " Taking 
him for all in all, I think it will be conceded that 
Michael Faraday was the greatest experimental phi- 
losopher the world has ever seen." 

Like so many other really great men, however, he 
seemed to me one of the most modest and simple. 
Declining all distinctions and honors, and remaining, as 
he said he would, " plain Michael Faraday to the last," 
he has impressed that name upon the pages of science 
so deeply that it can never be effaced. Lyell in- 
troduced me to him after the lecture was over, and 
nothing could have been more kind or cordial than 
his reception of me. His whole air and address were 
those of one who had rather been made to feel more 
humble, than more proud, by his successful researches 
into the realms of Nature, and who was rather awed 
by the wonders which baffled his inquiries than intoxi- 
cated by the success of his discoveries. 



A FRAGMENT 



Faraday had a distinguished audience that day ; and 
I remember being introduced to Dean Mihnan among 
others, and to Dr. Edward Stanley, then Bishop of 
Norwich, the father of my lamented friend the Dean 
of Westminster. Lyell, Faraday, Milman, and Stanley 
were a goodly company of notables to have been per- 
sonally associated with in a single hour of my first 
morning in London. 

But though the audience was a distinguished one, 
it was by no means numerous. The little theatre of 
the British Institution was, indeed, well filled, but it 
could hardly accommodate more than a few hundreds ; 
and I could not help reverting to the scene I had wit- 
nessed only a few evenings before I sailed from Boston, 
when I was one of fifteen hundred or two thousand 
persons crowding every seat and every corner of the 
hall of the old Masonic Temple to hear a lecture on the 
glaciers by Louis Agassiz. Nor did I fail to remember, 
before I left the British Institution, that its earliest 
and most effective promoter, if not its absolute founder, 
was a native of my own country and of my own State, 

— Benjamin Thompson, afterward known to all the 
world as Count Rumford, of whom an admirable bio- 
graphy has been written by my friend Dr. George E. 
Ellis, and published under the auspices of the American 
Academy of Arts and Sciences: a man whose great 
services — military, civil, and still more philanthropic 

— in Bavaria, and whose eminent contributions to 
science and the practical arts, have entitled him to a 
celebrity only second to that of Franklin in our own 
land, and not inferior to that of Tyndall or Faraday on 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 5 

the other side of the AtUintic. But Rumford was of 
another generation, and does not come within the 
scope of these reminiscences. 

A Sunday now intervened, of which it is enough to 
say that I spent a large portion of it in attending a 
service at Westminster Abbey and in hngering among 
its memorials of the mighty dead. 

On Monday I began to make use of my notes of 
introduction, and one of my earliest calls was upon 
Sir Robert Peel. Stopping at his door in Whitehall 
Gardens in a somewhat shabby equipage, I remember 
well the peremptory tone in which I was told by his 
servant, in answer to my inquiry, that Sir Robert was 
not at home. But I remember, too, how speedily that 
tone was changed when I handed him my card with 
the note of introduction, on the back of which was 
written, in his own clear and well-remembered chi- 
rography, the name of Edward Everett. " Oh, Mr. 
Everett, — I beg pardon, sir," exclaimed the footman ; 
" if you will wait a moment, I will take in the letter 
and card and see if Sir Robert may not have returned." 
In another minute, the welcome sound was heard, — 
" Sir Robert is at home, and will be very glad to see 
you." This great statesman, who only a year or two 
before had been Prime Minister, was now in retirement, 
— if, indeed, the position of an active and leading 
member of the House of Commons can ever be 
called retirement. But he had no other official posi- 
tion, and was free from the absorbing labors and over- 
whelming responsibilities of a Premier. The name of 



6 A FRAGMENT 

Mr. Everett, for whom Sir Robert had a great regard, 
secured for me a reception which I could not otherwise 
have enjoyed, and I was soon disabused of the impres- 
sion I had carried with me from hearing so often of 
" the proverbial coldness of Sir Robert Peel." After a 
few moments' conversation about Everett and about 
American affairs, he said to me : " You find me en- 
gaged at this moment in filling out cards," — for he was 
doing this with his own pen, and had a pile of them on 
the table at which he was sitting, — " for an exhibition 
of my pictures next Saturday. I must write your 
name on one of them, and you must come. You will 
find the pictures worth seeing, and, besides, you will 
meet many of our best artists and not a few of our 
most distinguished persons. But where are you going 
to-night? Have you been to the House of Commons? 
There is a debate in which you cannot fail to be in- 
terested." I told him at once that I had already made 
arrangements to go with Mr. Bancroft, who had kindly 
proposed to take me with him to the Diplomatic Box. 
"I am glad of that," said he; "I shall know where to 
find you." And so I took my leave, and proceeded 
on my round of visits. 

At an early hour of the evening I went with Mr. 
Bancroft to the House of Commons, and after some 
preliminary business had been gone through, the Edu- 
cation Bill was taken up. Several of the members 
came out from their seats to talk with Bancroft, and 
one of them — Sir William Molesworth, if I remember 
ricrht — took him off to their refreshment-room for a 
cup of tea, leaving me alone. Just then I observed 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 7 

Sir Robert, who was at the farther end of the House, 
hfting his eye-glass and looking intently toward me. 
He presently rose, and marching in his somewhat 
deliberate and stately way the whole length of the 
chamber, came up and took the seat next to me which 
Bancroft had left. His conversation was charming, as 
he recalled some of the incidents of his long service in 
the Commons and pointed out to me the seats of some 
of the older glories of the House, as well as of some of 
those most distinguished at the moment. He had then 
been in Parliament almost as long as I had lived, — 
having been first elected in the year I was born (1809), 
and having served with almost all the men best known 
to the modern history of England, except Pitt and Fox, 
who died three years before he was old enough to be 
chosen. During the half-hour he remained at my side, 
several members of note had entered into the debate, 
among them Mr. Roebuck. But suddenly " the Right 
Honorable member for Edinburgh " was announced by 
the Speaker, when Sir Robert said quietly but quickly 
to me, " You must excuse me now ; Macaulay has the 
floor, and I never fail to attend closely to what he 
says." And so he marched back to his seat. 

A night or two afterward I was again at the House 
of Commons, when the debate was closed long after 
midnight by Lord John Russell and Sir Robert himself. 
Sir Robert spoke for an hour and a half in a masterly 
manner, fulfilling all my expectations, and impressing 
me deeply with his power and persuasiveness as a 
debater. With a clear and telling voice, and a figure 
of striking dignity ; without studied rhetoric or flights 



8 A FRAGMENT 

of fancy; simple, earnest, and at times almost impas- 
sioned, — lie seemed peculiarly fitted for a parliamen- 
tary leader. I know not how it may have been with 
him on other occasions, but on that night he exhibited 
hardly anything of the hesitation which was then one 
of the proverbial attributes of English speal^ers. His 
course upon the Corn Laws the year before had not 
only cost him his place at the head of the government, 
but had broken up his party and made many of his old 
friends look coldly and even angrily at him. But he 
bore himself as bravely as if he were still the idol of 
the hour, and commanded the unbroken attention of a 
crowded house. 

On the Saturday following, I was at the exhibition 
of Sir Robert's pictures, and found him surrounded 
with all that was most distinguished in art or science, 
in literature, in the Church, and in the State. There 
were Landseer and Leslie and Turner and Sir William 
Ross, and Eastlake and Stansfield and Westmacott. 
There were Hallam and Rogers and Faraday and 
Buckland and Dickens ; there were Bunsen and Ban- 
croft of the diplomatic corps, and Lord John Russell 
and Sir James Graham, and the Duke of Cambridge 
and the great Duke of Wellington, and I know not 
how many more celebrated men. And there on the 
walls were Sir Joshua's Dr. Johnson, and Rubens's 
Chapeau de Faille, and a wonderful Hobbema, and an 
exquisite Cuyp, and Backhuysens and Vanderveldes 
and Wouvermans and Gerard Douws and Metzus and 
Mieris and Jan Steens, until one's eye ached from 
gazing intently on brilliant color and beautiful design, 



OF AUTOBIOGKAPUY. 9 

and sought relief in the pleasant chat of tho.se who 
were fairer even, than the pictures, — for not a few 
brilliant women were of the party. The pictures, too, 
I was to see again a fortnight afterwards at a party 
given to Sir Harry Smith, the hero of Scinde, who had 
just returned home ; and they were not less beautiful 
by candle-light than by daylight. Sir Robert had 
invited me to dine at the banquet which preceded 
this evening party, and soon afterwards also sent me 
a card for the annual dinner of the Royal Academy ; 
but engagements prevented me from accepting either 
invitation, and I left London never to meet him again. 
It was only three years afterward that he fell from his 
horse on Constitution Hill, and died at only sixty-two, 
leaving a name which will be associated with as fine 
an example of pure and Christian statesmanship as 
has ever adorned the history of his country. 

The day after my first call on Sir Robert Peel I drove 
to Apsley House, and left a parcel and note, with which 
Mr. Everett had intrusted me, for the Duke of Wel- 
lington, leaving my own card also, as the Duke had 
gone to the Horse Guards. The same evening Lord 
St. Germans took me to the House of Lords, and as 
he took care to be there before the Lord Chan- 
cellor had taken his seat on the woolsack, he in- 
troduced me to some distinguished peers, and among 
others to the great Duke. On my name being men- 
tioned to him, he replied : " Oh, yes, Mr. Winthrop, 
you did me the favor to bring me a note nnd parcel 
from my friend Everett. You must come and dine 



10 A. FEAGMENT 

with me. AVill you come to-morrow and meet the 
Directors of the Ancient Music, and go to the con- 
cert with us?" The Duke, as is well known, had a 
passion for ancient music, and indeed for music of all 
kinds. His father, the Earl of Mornington, was a com- 
poser, and several of his compositions are to be found 
among the chants and hymns of the Church of England. 
The Duke himself composed at least one chant, which 
I have often heard sung at Trinity Church, Boston. 
The Ancient Music Association was one of the oldest 
musical institutions in London, and its directors at 
that time included Prince Albert as well as the Duke 
of Wellington and others of the nobility. The direc- 
tors were accustomed to dine at one another's houses, 
and proceed thence to the concert-hall. That night 
they were to dine with the Duke. But, alas ! a dinner- 
party had been made for me on that same evening by 
Lord Morpeth, afterward seventh Earl of Carlisle, 
whom I had known at Washington, and who had 
asked me to fix the day ; and I was not yet familiar 
enough with English etiquette to understand that the 
Duke's invitations, like those of royalty, were con- 
sidered as commands, or at least as supplying ample 
apologies for breaking previous engagements. And so, 
in the simplicity of my heart, I told the Duke that 
Lord Morpeth had made a dinner for me that evening, 
from which I could hardly excuse myself. He took it 
most amiably, and added, " Well, we must fix another 
time." The death of his brother. Lord Cowley, was an- 
nounced from Paris not long after, and he suspended 
all ceremonious company. But if I lost my dinner 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 11 

with the Duke, I tried at least to console myself by the 
reflection that I was probably one of the few Americans 
— if not the only one — who had ever had the oppor- 
tunity to decline to dine with him. 

It was not the only dinner which I regretted being 
obliged to decline during that visit to London. Sir 
Robert Peel's invitation to meet the Royal Academy, 
Bunsen's to meet the Royal Literary Fund Society, 
Sir John Herschel's to meet the Royal Astronomical 
Society, and the Duke of Richmond's to meet the 
Royal Agricultural Society, come back at times to my 
memory among lost opportunities, resulting from the 
most provoking conflicts of engagements. But that 
lost dinner at the Duke's was my first and deepest 
disappointment. 

A few evenings later, however (Monday, April 26), 
I had an ample compensation. With an admission to 
stand on the steps of the throne, I heard the Duke 
make one of the best and most memorable speeches 
of his life. The debate was on permanent or limited 
enlistments in the army. Several old generals partici- 
pated, as experts, in the debate, — Lord Strafford, 
Lord Combermere, the Duke of Richmond, and others 
who had distinguished themselves on the Peninsula or 
at Waterloo. Lord Grey, Lord Lansdowne, Lord 
Stanley, and Lord Brougham, too, were all earnest 
and eloquent in the discussion, on one side or the 
other. But when the Duke rose from his seat on 
the cross-benches, there was a silence which no one 
else had commanded. In a full suit of black, with his 
habitual white cravat fastened behind with a shining 



12 A FKAGMENT 

silver clasp, made conspicuous by the stoop of old age, 
and with hair as white as the cravat and as shining as 
the silver clasp, without gesture, without studied grace 
of attitude or of elocution, he made every word tell 
like a shot from a cannon. Beginning with a simple 
expression of his desire and determination to support 
her Majesty's Government, and, as her Majesty's 
Government (for this was a favorite phrase of his) had 
introduced it, to support this bill, — he proceeded to 
speak in the most interesting and most emphatic 
manner of the importance of retaining old soldiers in 
the army. He described some particular triumph 
which had recently been achieved in India, and then 
said : " I ask you, my Lords, whether such a feat could 
have been performed under such circumstances except 
by old soldiers. It would have been impossible. Bear 
in mind," he continued, " the conduct of the Emperor 
Napoleon with respect to old soldiers ; remember the 
manner in which he employed them; recollect, too, 
how much they are prized by every Power all over 
the world, — and then I will once more entreat your 
Lordships never to consent to any measure which 
would deprive her Majesty's service of old and expe- 
rienced men; and thus pave the way for disasters 
which assuredly would follow when the army should 
come to be employed in war." 

So powerful was this plea for old soldiers, coming 
from the lips of the hero of so many battles, that the 
Duke came very near overturning the measure he 
had proposed to vote for. The bill would have been 
in jeopardy (to say the least) had not an amendment 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPUY. 13 

been introduced allowing the re-enlistnient of the 
ten-years men, and counting their back service toward 
establishing their right to a pension. 

No scene in either branch of Parliament could have 
been so interesting as that of the aged Duke, thus 
pleading the cause of old soldiers and citing the exam- 
ple of the great Emperor whom he had defeated at 
Waterloo. It was said at the time to be one of the 
best and longest speeches he had ever made, and I 
was congratulated on having happened to hear it, 
I certainly congratulated myself. 

It was once common to hear the Duke of Welling- 
ton spoken of as a mere soldier. I remember how 
emphatically Daniel Webster repelled this idea at 
my father's dinner-table, more than sixty years ago, 
when the Duke had just been made Prime Minister. 
" A mere soldier ! " said Webster ; " there 's no airier 
diplomatist or statesman living than Arthur, Duke 
of Wellington. He makes no pretensions to being 
an orator, but both his written despatches and his 
reported speeches prove him adequate to every emer- 
gency of peace as well as of war ; and there is no 
man in England more capable of conducting the 
affairs of government with wisdom and efficiency." 

Walter Scott expressed the same opinion, after 
meetinsc the Duke in Paris in 1815, declarinof him 
" a great soldier and a great statesman, — the greatest 
of each ; " and saying of him very nearly what Erskine 
wrote to Washington, that he was the only man in 
whose presence he was awed and abashed. 

Before I left London, I had not onl}^ dined in 



14 A FRAGMENT 

company with him at Lord Ashburton's, and conversed 
with him for some minutes at the Queen's Ball, but 
had spent an hour at Apsley House, where he had 
kindly made an appointment with a lady whose great 
benefactions subsequently led the Queen to adorn 
the peerage with her name, to receive her, with one 
other friend and myself, and show us the Waterloo 
Gallery in person. 

The Duke received Miss Burdett-Coutts at the 
carriage door ; and under his lead we passed up the 
grand staircase, with Canova's heroic statue of Napo- 
leon at its foot, and proceeded through the rooms. 
We had even a glimpse of the one with the little 
iron bedstead on which the Duke habitually slept, — 
giving as a reason why he had adopted a bed not big 
enough for any one to turn himself on, that when a 
man begins to turn at all in bed, it is time for him to 
turn out. 

On some of the walls we saw several portraits of 
Napoleon at different stages of his career, but I think 
not one of the Duke himself. A new picture had 
recently been sent to him by I forget what artist, 
and it was still lying on the floor. " That 's Ms 
idea," said the Duke, " of the battle of Waterloo." 
And then pointing to a portrait by Sir Thomas 
Lawrence, I believe, he said : " You see that portrait 
which has been injured on the corner. It is the 
first Lady Lyndhurst, who was very handsome. The 
mob once threw stones at me through the windows, 
but they only hurt the pictures." And then he 
showed us the iron shutters which he had put up for 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 15 

protecting himself and his pictures in future, and 
which he never would allow to be removed as long 
as he lived. He had a charming arrangement, too, 
of sliding mirrors over the windows of his grand 
drawing-room, so as to render it more brilliant at 
night ; but his aged arm not being quite equal to this 
effort, he appealed to me to aid him in exhibiting 
this contrivance to the ladies. After pointing out to 
us several large paintings, he quietly remarked, 
" They are only copies, however ; I returned the 
originals to the Spanish government.^ Here is one 
small original, though, which is very charming," said 
he. " Joseph Bonaparte carried it about with him 
in his carriage at Vittoria, and I had the good fortune 
to find it there after he had fled." And then he 
showed us a recent bust of his beautiful daughter- 
in-law, the Marchioness of Douro (now Duchess 
Dowager of Wellington), and pointed out with a 
pencil, which I feared would leave its mark upon the 
marble, exactly where it failed to do full justice to 
the original. Still again, he showed us the equestrian 
statuettes of Napoleon and himself in silver by Count 
d'Orsay, and commented critically on their execution. 
Finally, he took us into his sanctum. — his working- 
room, — where his despatch boxes and his books were 
piled up in every direction. The carpenters were 
engaged at the very moment in putting up new fix- 
tures. "You see," said he, "I am obliged to have 

1 An unscrupulous man might have retained them, as, thoiigli Spanish 
property, they had been stolen by the French and then captured by the 
Duke. 



16 A FRAGMENT 

more shelves for all these huge Parliamentary Reports. 
They will soon oidfoUo us out of our houses and homes." 
I had never heard that most significant phrase before ; 
I could not find it in any dictionary. It may have 
been used then for the first time ; at any rate, it came 
naturally and characteristically from one who had 
known so well how to oidflank his enemies. 

Before leaving the room, the Duke said to Miss 
Burdett-Coutts, " What are you going to do with your 
opera-box this evening ? " She replied that it would 
be entirely at his service, as she was going into the 
country. " Then write me an order for it at my desk, 
if you please." It was while she was writing this 
order, that relying on the Duke's being a little deaf, 
I whispered to her that if I were not afraid of annoy- 
ing him I would ask the Duke to write his name for 
me, while she was writing her name for him. " What 's 
that you w^ere saying ? " he exclaimed ; and on my 
confession, he added, " With all my heart," and pro- 
ceeded to write " Wellington " for me on a scrap of 
paper, dated May 29, 1847. 

Five years later the Duke died, and England was 
mourning for him almost at the same moment at which 
we were mourning for Webster. 

In the years 1824-25 (while I was in college), four 
young Englishmen visited the United States together, 
all of whom had distinguished careers, and one of 
whom became Prime Minister. They were Edward 
Stanley, then Mr. Stanley, afterward Lord Stanley, 
and ultimately fourteenth Earl of Derby ; Henry 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPUY. 17 

Labouchere, afterward Lord Taunton ; John Stuart- 
WoRTLEY, afterward second Lord Wharnelifte ; and 
John Evelyn Denison, afterward Speaker of the 
House of Commons and Viscount Ossington. Webster, 
who knew them all, as I subsequently did, had given 
me letters to Denison and Lord Stanley; and I had 
hardly returned from leaving my letter and card at the 
latter' s house in St. James Square before a note 
reached me from him, expressing his great regard for 
Mr. Webster, and fixing an evening for my dining 
with him. It was one of my first ceremonious banquets 
in London, and I can recall the name of no one 
present, except myself, who did not rejoice in some 
title of nobility. The Duke of Richmond, the Marquis 
of Exeter, the Earl of Desart with his then young and 
beautiful countess. Lord Redesdale, and others, made 
up a good representation of the Conservative party. 
As I was the only Commoner, my turn came last in 
going down to dinner ; but I found a seat reserved for 
me next to the Duke of Richmond and Lady Stanley, 
and I could not have been more agreeably placed. 
Before the ladies had retired, Lord Stanley called to 
me across the table to inquire whether I had heard 
lately from his friend Webster, and asked me to join 
him in drinking the latter's health. This was the best 
introduction I could have had to the rest, and secured 
me cordial attentions. 

A few evenings afterward, I heard Stanley speak for 
more than an hour in the House of Lords, and was 
fully able to understand and appreciate the great 
celebrity he had acquired as an orator. Few English 

2 



18 A FRAGMENT 

statesmen, indeed, had enjoyed greater celebrity for 
eloquence, at so early an age, while he was in the 
House of Commons. When I heard him first, he was 
by no means old ; but sharp and severe attacks of the 
hereditary malady of so many old English families 
had somewhat subdued his fiery tone, and the House 
of Peers was not altogether a field for the Hotspur 
quality which he had exhibited in the Commons or on 
the hustings. But there was a rich melody in his 
tones, and a faultless finish in his phrases and periods, 
and a masterly arrangement and treatment of his 
topics, which commanded the deepest attention and 
admiration. I heard him thirteen years, and again 
nearly twenty years, afterward, when the fire was 
burning still lower, and within a twelvemonth of his 
death. But his singular charm of tone and thought 
and illustration and manner were still unimpaired. 

He was a fine classical scholar ; and the translation 
into English blank verse of Homer's Iliad, published 
by him a few years before his death, and which had 
been the diversion of his leisure hours, will secure him 
an enviable remembrance in literary history. The late 
George Ticknor, no mean critic, said to me one day, 
"Have you read Lord Derby's Homer?" And on my 
replying that I was reading it at the moment, he con- 
tinued : " Well, I have read almost the whole of it, and 
have compared the most noted passages both with the 
original Greek, and with Pope and Chapman and other 
translators, and I like it better than any. I do not 
believe Wordsworth could have done it so well, if he 
had tried ; and some of the most striking passages seem 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 19 

to me rendered just as Milton himself would have 
rendered them had he undertaken the work." Not 
long after, I asked an eminent Greek professor of Har- 
vard University (Sophocles) whether he had read it, 
and he replied : " Every word of it, and I think it the 
most faithful to the original of all the English transla- 
tions." Such tributes — one from a master in English, 
and the other from a master in Greek — make up a 
judgment which can hardly be appealed from or 
reversed. 

Lord Derby died at only seventy years of age, in 
1869, leaving a son, the recently deceased fifteenth 
earl of that name, who more than once discharged the 
duties of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs with 
signal ability, and who, with more than his father's 
practical wisdom, though with less of his eloquence, 
added new lustre to a historic title. I saw much of 
him during a visit he paid to Washington when I was 
Speaker. In later years I was repeatedly his guest in 
London, and he sometimes favored me with letters 
upon public affairs. 

I had no letter to Lord Brougham, but no one could 
be a week in London society without seeing him, or a 
nig-ht in the House of Lords without hearing him. I 
may add, that no one who had ever seen or ever heard 
him would be in any danger of forgetting how he 
looked or how he spoke. That peculiar " Paul Pry " 
figure and physiognomy, that upturned feature ever 
on the scent of something, that quick nervous gait with 
the glaring stripes on his habitual trousers, could never 



20 A FEAGMENT 

be mistaken. I met him twice at the table of Lord 
Lyndhurst, on two successive visits to England at an 
interval of nearly thirteen years, but the lapse of time 
had left its mark upon everything and everybody 
except Brougham. He was the same restless, inquisi- 
tive, loquacious, almost garrulous, person in 1860 as in 
1847, full of experience, full of information, full of 
ambition, eager for applause, eager for controversy, 
never weary of work, never tired of talk, and of whom 
it might be doubted whether he was most anxious to 
shine in social or in public life, — as a statesman, or as 
a ladies' man. 

I heard him make a long and eloquent speech on 
the limitation by statute of the hours of labor to ten 
hours, or it may have been to eight hours. In the 
course of it he alluded to the condition and example 
of the United States ; and as he pronounced the name 
of our country, he paused for an instant and gathered 
himself up for one of those long and involved paren- 
theses in which he delighted to indulge, and which 
he began somewhat as follows: "The United States, 
my Lords, — a country for which I once had some 
respect, and of which I should be glad, if it were in 
my power, to speak respectfully at this moment, but 
which has so outraged the sense of the civilized world 
by" — I forget by what, but it was undoubtedly by 
something connected with the Mexican War, which was 
then raging, or with the annexation of Texas, or with 
the toleration of slavery. 

So violent was his tone toward this country, that 
one or two peers present to whom I was personally 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 21 

known and by whom I was recognized, — the late Lord 
Clarendon for one, — expressed to me a deep regret 
that I should have been there to hear such an out- 
break, but then added that there was a meaning to 
it which I ought to understand. He proceeded to 
tell me that a beautiful American lady, for whom 
Brougham had a special admiration, had promised to 
come down to the House of Lords that evening to hear 
him speak, and that he had waited a considerable time 
to conduct her to the ladies' gallery ; but a headache 
or other indisposition had prevented her from coming, 
and so Brougham had vented his impatience and 
disappointment in this parenthetical attack upon her 
country. The lad}^, not having been there to hear it, 

— indeed, there would have been nothing of the sort 
to hear had she been able to keep her appointment, 

— was probably never aware how severe an attack 
her beauty and her headache conjoined had cost her 
country. 

But Lord Brougham's bark was ever w^orse than his 
bite. These impetuous sallies of severity and sarcasm 
were really only parentheses in the powerful and bril- 
liant speeches of this remarkable orator, whose elo- 
quence both at the bar and in the two Houses of Par- 
liament, during a long term of years, was hardly 
inferior to that of any man of his time. 

Nor was his eloquence confined only to public places 
and occasions. He had few equals for that conversa- 
tional wit, humor, anecdote, and off-hand repartee 
which are the life of a dinner-table. I recall a dinner- 
party given by Miss Burdett-Coutts on the day on 



22 A FRAGMENT 

which she had laid the corner-stone of the beautiful 
church built by her in the district associated with her 
father Sir Francis Burdett's parliamentary service, and 
as a memorial of his labors, — when Lord Dundonald, 
who had just been restored to the honors of which he 
had been unjustly deprived, and Lord Brougham, 
and many others of her father's old friends were 
assembled around her ; and when the brilliancy of the 
feast and of the company was quite eclipsed by the 
scintillations and coruscations of Brougham's wit and 
anecdote. I dare not attempt to describe them. 

Nor was Lord Brougham by any means unwilling to 
recognize a great American example, when an oppor- 
tunity offered itself. There is no nobler tribute to the 
pre-eminent glory of Washington than that sentence 
of Brougham's, which he repeated in the same pre- 
cise words on two separate occasions, ten or twelve 
years apart: "It will be the duty of the historian 
and the sage in all ages to let no occasion pass of 
commemorating this illustrious man ; and, until time 
shall be no more, will a test of the progress which 
our race has made in wisdom and virtue be derived 
from the veneration paid to the immortal name of 
Washington." 

I was dining in company with him in 1860, just after 
he had repeated in an address at the University of 
Edinburgh this memorable sentence, which I had 
quoted from him twelve years before in laying the 
corner-stone of the National Monument to Washington ; 
and I ventured to allude to the repetition, and to my 
having had such good reason for remembering the 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 23 

sentence. He said at once that he was proud to have 
the sentence remembered by an American, and that he 
had used it twice designedly, in the same precise words, 
as an evidence that it was his deliberate judgment on 
Washington's career and character. So we agreed to 
exchange addresses ; and the next day he sent me not 
only his Edinburgh discourse, but a volume also of 
" Tracts, Mathematical and Physical," which he had 
just published, with an autograph inscription. 

Of Lord Lyndhurst, — an American by birth, as is 
well known, — I can recall but little bej^ond what I 
said in announcing his death to the Massachusetts 
Historical Society, of which he was an Honorary 
Member. It is all printed in their Proceedings for 
November, 1863, and in the second volume of my 
Addresses and Speeches. A sentence or two will 
suffice for these reminiscences : — 

"He was one of the few parliamentary orators, of 
late years, who commanded attention beyond the limits 
of his own land, and whose speeches, on foreign and 
domestic questions alike, were read with interest and 
eagerness in all parts of the world. There are those 
here who remember well how emphatically Mr. Webster 
spoke, on his return from England many years ago. of 
the clearness, cogency, and true eloquence which char- 
acterized a speech of Lyndhurst's which he himself 
had been fortunate enough to hear. Like Webster, he 
was especially remarkable for the power and precision 
with w^hich he stated his case, and for the lucid order 
in which he arranged and argued it. His advancing 



24 A FRAGMENT 

age seemed only to add mellowness and richness to 
his eloquence, while it greatly enhanced the inter- 
est with which he was listened to. As late as 1860, 
when he was on the verge of his eighty-ninth year, 
he made a speech on the respective rights of the 
two Houses of Parliament, which was regarded as 
a model of argument and oratory, and which made 
London ring anew wdth admiration of ' the old man 
eloquent.' 

" No one who has enjoyed his hospitality will soon 
forget his genial and charming manners, and the almost 
boyish gayety and glee with which he entered into the 
amusements of the hour. The last time I saw him, 
less than four years ago, he rose from his own dinner- 
table, and placing one arm on the shoulder of our 
accomplished associate, Mr. Motley, and the other on 
my own, he proceeded toward the drawing-room, — 
remarking playfully, as he w^ent, that he believed he 
could always rely safely on the support of his fellow- 
Bostonians. . . . Living to the great age of nearly 
ninety-two years, with almost unimpaired faculties, 
taking a lively and personal interest to the end both 
in pubhc affairs and in social enjoyments, and dying at 
last the senior peer of England, — his name and fame 
wnll not soon be forgotten. It may safely be said, that 
Boston has given birth to but few men — perhcaps 
only to one othei, Franldiu — who will have secured 
a more permanent or prominent place in the world's 

history." 

Boston certainly may be proud of having given a 
Lord Chancellor to England. Lyndhurst held that 
high office three times. 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPUY. 25 

I cannot remember whether my introduction to 
Samuel Rogers, the poet, in connection with whom, 
as the author of the " Pleasures of Memory," nothing 
oucrht to be forojotten, was from Webster or Everett; 
but he did full honor to whichever it was, by calling 
at once and offering me the kindest attentions. Noth- 
ing: could be more characteristic than one of his first 
notes to me : — 

My dear Mr. Winthrop, — Pray, pray come and break- 
fast with me at quarter before 10, any morning or every 



morning. 



Yours ever, S. Rogers. 



And so I breakfasted with him repeatedly, — twice, 
absolutely alone ; more frequently with five or six 
others. 

One great advantage to a stranger in breakfasting 
with Rogers alone was this : he could tell over again 
his oldest and best stories, with the assurance that they 
had not been heard before. In a mixed party, on the 
other hand, one or more persons were certain to have 
heard them previously, and this restrained and discon- 
certed him. 

At one of these tete-a-tetes, I remember that he 
dwelt almost entirely on the Duke of Wellington. 
He told me that many years before, when he Avas din- 
ing in company with the great English hero", the Duke 
said : " I wonder why it is that nobody ever invites me 
to dine on Sundays. I get three or four invitations 
for every other day of the week ; but on Sunday, after 

1 There was no date to this uote. 



26 A FRAGMENT 

going to church [for the Duke was a regular attendant 
on public worship], I have only a late lonely dinner at 
home, and a desolate evening." As soon as Rogers 
reached home, he sat down and wrote two or three in- 
vitations on this wise : — 

" Mr. Rogers requests the honor of the Duke of Welling- 
ton's company at dinner on Sunday next, at 7| o'clock." 

" Mr. Rogers requests the honor of the Duke of Welling- 
ton's company on Sunday week [giving the date of the fol- 
lowing Sunday], at 1^ o'clock." 

Sending them both together to Apsley House, an 
affirmative answer to both was received without delay ; 
and the Duke dined habitually with Rogers for many 
Sundays in succession during that season, and perhaps 
during more than one season. 

Rogers took care to avoid introducing strangers or 
ceremonious company to these dinners, — asking only 
two or three of the particular friends of the Duke, so 
that he should converse entirely without constraint. 
Of these conversations Rogers made careful record ; 
and on one of the mornings I was with him alone, he 
sent his confidential servant upstairs for his journals 
of that period, and read to me many interesting pas- 
sages from them, particularly one of the Duke's account 
of his resigning his post in 1830, '' rather," as he said, 
" than be the head of a faction." This was about the 
time of his greatest unpopularity, when his windows 
were broken by the mob. Rogers ended by telling me 
what I could not have imagined before, that the Duke 
never saw Napoleon Bonaparte. He may have brought 



OF AUTOBIOGKAPIIY. 27 

the focus of his field-ghiss to bear upon huu, in looking 
at some group at Waterloo, but he never consciously 
saw the Emperor. 

I remember well, too, Rogers's reading to me at 
length, as the most striking scene he had ever met 
with in the records of real life, the account of Colonel 
the Hon. Frederick Ponsonby's sufferings on the field of 
Waterloo, as given in a little work called "A Voice 
from Waterloo," by Sergeant-Major Cotton. I bought 
this book from the Sergeant-Major himself at Mont St. 
Jean soon afterward, while he was guiding me over 
the field of the battle. The account of Colonel Pon- 
sonby is found at page 244, and is as follows : — 

" Colonel Ponsonby, of the 12th Lt, Dragoons, gives the 
following account of himself on being wounded. He says ; 
' In the melee [thick of the fight] I was almost instantly dis- 
abled in both my arms, losing first my sword, and then my 
rein ; and followed by a few of my men who were presently 
cut down, no quarter being asked or given, I was carried 
along by my horse, till receiving a blow from a sabre, I fell 
senseless on my face to the ground. Recovering, I raised 
myself a little to look round, being at that time in a condi- 
tion to get up and run away, when a lancer passing by cried 
out, " Tu n'es pas mort, coquin ! " and struck his lance 
through my back. My head dropped, the blood gushed into 
my mouth, a difficulty of breathing came on, and I thought 
all was over. Not long after, a skirmisher stopped to plun- 
der me, threatening my life. I directed him to a small side- 
pocket, in which he found three dollars, all I had ; but he 
continued to threaten, tearing open my waistcoat, and leaving 
me in a very uneasy posture. 

" ' But he was no sooner gone, than an officer bringing up 
some troops, and happening to halt where I lay, stooped 
down, and addressing me, said he feared I was badly 



28 A FRAGMENT 

wounded. I answered that I was, and expressed a wish to 
be moved to the rear. He said it was against orders to re- 
move even their own men ; but that if they gained the day 
(and he understood that the Duke of WelHngton was killed, 
and that six of our battalions had surrendered), ever}^ atten- 
tion in his power should be shown me. I complained of 
thirst, and he held his brandy bottle to my lips, directing one 
of his soldiers to lay me straight on my side, and place a 
knapsack under my head. They then passed on into action, 
soon perhaps to want, though not to receive, the same assist- 
ance ; and I shall never know to whose generosity I was 
indebted, as I believe, for my life. By and by, another 
skirmisher came up, a fine young man, loading and tiring. 
He knelt down and fired over me many times, conversing 
with me very gayly all the while. At last he ran off, saying, 
" Vous serez bien aise d'apprendre que nous allons retirer. 
Bon jour, mon ami." It was dusk when two squadrons of 
Prussian cavalry crossed the valley in full trot, lifting me 
from the ground and tumbling me about cruelly. The battle 
was now over, and the groans of the wounded all around me 
became more audible. I thought the night never would end. 
About this time I found a soldier lying across my legs, and 
his weight, his convulsive motions, his noises, and the air 
issuing through a wound in his side distressed me greatly, — 
the last circumstance most of all, as I had a wound of the 
same nature myself. It was not a dark night, and the Prus- 
sians were wandering about to plunder. Many of them 
stopped to look at me as they passed ; at last one of them 
stopped to examine me. I told him that I was a British 
officer, and had been already plundered. He did not, how- 
ever, desist, and pulled me about roughly. An hour before 
midnight I saw a man in an English uniform coming toward 
me ; he was, I suspected, on the same errand. I spoke in- 
stantly, telling him who I was. He belonged to the 40th, 
and he had missed his regiment. He released me from the 
dying soldier, and took up a sword and stood over me as a 
sentinel. Day broke, and at six o'clock in the morning a 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 29 

messenger was sent to Herv(i ; a cart came for me, and I 
was conveyed to the village of Waterloo, and laid in the 
bed, as I afterward understood, from which Gordon had 
but just before been carried out. I had received seven 
wounds ; a surgeon slept in my room, and I was saved by 
excessive bleeding.' " 

It may be conceived that I " supped full of horrors," 
or rather breakfasted, in hearing this thrilling account 
from the sepulchral voice of the old poet. 

At another of these breakfasts I met Milman, the 
Dean of St. Paul's ; Whewell, the well-known Master of 
Trinity ; Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's and historian 
of Greece, and Lord Glenelg, a former Secretary of 
State for the Colonies, — among whom a discussion 
arose as to what, upon the whole, was the best stori/ 
ever written. The unanimous voice was for Goldsmith's 
" Vicar of Wakefield ; " and on a further inquiry as to 
the next best, the general judgment, to my great sur- 
prise, for I could not then remember that I had ever 
read it, was in favor of Mrs. Inchbald's " Simple Story." 
It happened that in Paris, not long afterwards, I picked 
up a volume of '• Baudry's European Library," contain- 
ing only these two stories bound together. I bought it 
at once, and wrote this judgment of these London wits 
on the fly-leaf, as a souvenir of the occasion. 

x\t still another of these breakfasts I met only ladies, 
— the Countess of Orford and her daughter Lady Doro- 
thy Walpole, since better known as Lady Dorothy 
Nevill, the Dowager Lady Lyttleton, Mrs. Leicester 
Stanhope, afterward Countess of Harrington, and Lady 
Bulwer-Lytton. This was on the 17th of July, accord- 



30 A FKAGMENT 

ing to my journal; and Rogers is said in the Biographi- 
cal Dictionaries to have been born on the 31st, a fortnight 
later. But the occasion was certainly alluded to as 
Rogers's birthday festival, — his eighty-fourth, — and 
Lady Bulwer-Lytton took from her bosom an original 
ode for the occasion, which she read to him aloud. I 
remember, too, his telling me that he had a journal of 
sixty-seven years ago, recording a dinner in Paris (at 
which he was present) of twelve persons, I think, all 
but two or three of whom had afterward died violent 
deaths. This must have been at the table of Lafayette, 
as in " The Table-Talk of Rogers," published after his 
death, he speaks of his first visit to France, just before 
the Revolution, as follows (page 41) : — 

" When we reached Paris, Lafayette gave us a general invi- 
tation to dine with him every day. At his table we once 
dined with about a dozen persons (among them the Due de 
la Rochefoucauld, Condorcet, etc.) most of whom afterward 
came to an untimely end." 

Rogers must ever be remembered kindly by Ameri- 
cans, were it only for the anecdote he was so fond of 
recalling of his father, who, on hearing of the first blood 
shed at Lexington, — he himself remembered it as a 
boy of twelve years old, — put on a full suit of black, 
and afterward wore nothing but mourning colors until 
his death. He sent me a beautiful copy of his works, 
in two volumes, with an autograph inscription, before 
I left England, and on my return home I ventured to 
recall myself to his remembrance by sending him a 
little essay on " Health " by my brother-in-law, the late 
Dr. John C. Warren, together with two of my own 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 31 

addresses and speeches, — one of them, that in which 
as Speaker of the House of Representatives of the 
United States I had announced the death of Ex-Presi- 
dent John Quincy Adams. 

His acknowledgment is too characteristic to be 
omitted from these reminiscences : — 

London, April 20, 1848. 

My dear Mr. Winthrop, — Recall yourself to my remem- 
brance is what you cannot do, for I must first forget you, and 
forget the many pleasant hours I have passed in your com- 
pany. The first volume (on Health) I have read again and 
again with no less profit than pleasure, and the second who 
can leave till he has read it ? 

They would have been precious gifts, come whence they 
might, and I need not say how highly I shall value them on 
every account, for their own sake and for yours. 

But are you now condemned to listen, and am I never 
again to hear you ? Being now acquainted with your voice, 
I could now hear you when you spoke, and, deaf as I am, 
catch every syllable from your lips when it came across the 
Atlantic. 

What strange events are now passing in the Old World ! 
May they not extend to the New ! 

Yours with great regard, 

Samuel Rogers. 

A thousand thanks for your very affecting address in 
Congress. J. Q. A. lias sat with me more tlian once as my 
guest at the very table on which I am now writing. 

Rogers has often been called surly and C3'nical, and 
he certainly knew how to show his teeth on occasions. 
He liked to say striking, epigrammatic things. One 
morning Chester Harding, our well-remembered por- 



32 A FEAGMENT 

trait painter, called on me in London and said : " I am 
taking a portrait of Rogers, and he is to give me a 
sitting to-day. I want you, and he wants you, to come 
and keep him company while I am painting him." An 
inexorable engagement compelled me to decline the 
invitation. The portrait was finished, and not long 
afterward one of Rogers's friends said to him, " So 
you have been sitting to an American artist. Is it 
like?" '' Infermlly like I'" was the only reply. Yet 
the picture was a good one, and quite just to the origi- 
nal. It was for Mr. Everett, and long adorned his 
library. But it is hardly surprising that with so much 
youth of heart, a poet should be impatient under a 
faithful representation of all the infirmities and wrinkles 
of eighty-four. 

I met Rogers often at other houses besides his own. 
I was at luncheon with him one day at Miss Burdett- 
Coutts's, when the servant came in and whispered 
something in her ear, upon which she instantly ex- 
claimed, "Why, Mr. Wordsworth is at the door!" 
"Wordsworth!" said Rogers, ^'he is not in London." 
But in another moment the great poet of the Lakes 
was with us at the table, and I was of course presented 
to him. As it happened, I had brought a letter to him 
from Mr. Ticknor, which I was to use on my way along 
the Cumberland Lakes, and on learning this he greeted 
me most pleasantly. While we were at table, Miss 
Coutts chanced to inquire after a favorite servant 
named James, whom she had seen at Rydal Mount. 
" He is with me," said Wordsworth. " With you ! 
where?" asked Rogers. "At the door," said Words- 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 33 

worth. "James at the door! " exclaimed Miss Coutts, 
^'why, I must go and see him." "So must I," said 
Rogers. And thereupon the whole party hastened out 
to the street door in Stratton Street to greet the faith- 
ful attendant of the poet, who had won upon all their 
hearts by the care which he took of his aged master. 

Wordsworth was then in his seventy-eighth year, 
and looked quite infirm, with a spiritual look like 
our Washington Allston's. He was in the first anxiety, 
too, for a beloved daughter, who died in a few weeks 
from that time, just as I was passing along Windermere 
with a view of calling to see her father agreeably to 
his request and my promise. I was unwilling to in- 
trude upon so fresh a grief, and wrote him a note of 
sympathy and apology. The luncheon at Miss Burdett- 
Coutts's was thus my only interview with Wordsworth. 
He died in 1850. Ten years after his death, I was 
again among the Lakes, and as I was passing his house 
I saw a red flag at the gate, betokening an auction 
sale. I stopped, and found that Wordsworth's library 
was being sold in the barn, to which it had been 
removed. I went in and found quite a company of 
book-fanciers. I saw one parcel knocked off, but could 
not resist the temptation of the second parcel. I made 
a bid, and was successful ; but on being called on for 
my name, I asked leave to take the books and pay for 
them at once, and to my consternation was refused. 
So I had to make a little speech in Wordsworth's barn, 
saying " that I was an American, accidentally passing 
by, and that my family were awaiting me in the rain at 

3 



34 A FRAGMENT 

the door ; that I had enjoyed the privilege of knowing 
Mr. Wordsworth personally, and desired only to obtain 
a souvenir of one I had so much admired." The 
auctioneer at last gave a surly assent, taking my 
money and giving me the books, but stoutly declaring 
that it was the only such interruption he would 
tolerate. So I paid my money and carried off my 
prize rejoicing. 

The books were quite miscellaneous, and of no great 
intrinsic value ; but almost all of them had Words- 
worth's autograph, and had evidently been read by 
him. Indeed, one of them proved to be a book of 
which he had a high opinion. Crabb Robinson, in his 
Reminiscences, says of George Dyer : " He wrote one 
good book, the ' Life of Robert Robinson,' which I have 
heard Wordsworth mention as one of the best books of 
biography in the language," adding that " Dr. Samuel 
Parr pronounced the same opinion." This was one of 
the books which I purchased so accidentally in Words- 
worth's barn at Rydal Mount, and it has an additional 
interest from its quaint calico binding. Happening to 
show it to Lord Houghton, when he was one day 
lunching with me in Boston, he told me that it was 
probably bound by Mrs. Southey, whose habit it was to 
bind her husband's books with fragments of her chintz 
or calico dresses, and who may have treated one of her 
neighbor's books to a similar covering. The volume is 
thus doubly redolent of the Lake poets. 

Of BucKLAND and Whewell and Ltell and Hal- 
lam, all of whom I met often, and to more than one of 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 35 

whom I was indebted for repeated attentions, I have 
little except their kindness to recall. Yet I cannot 
omit a delightful breakfast at Hallara's at which many 
of them were present, and with them the late amiable 
Earl of Carlisle, to whom I have previously alluded as 
Lord Morpeth. English reserve has rarely been more 
strikingly illustrated than when, during this breakfast, 
Milman inquired across the table as follows : — 

" Lyell, I am quite curious to know who it was I sat 
next to at breakfast yesterday at Buckland's. He was 
a most intelligent and agreeable person. Did you 
know his name ? " 

" No," said Lyell, " I really did not know who he 
was, though I was as much struck with him as you 
were ! " 

English people at that day never introduced persons 
to one another, and you might breakfast or dine out 
in the best society every day for a whole season with- 
out knowing to whom you had sat next or with whom 
you had been conversing. It was at this same break- 
fast, I think, that Lord Carlisle said to me, — 

"Mr. Winthrop, did you hear Chalmers last Sun- 
day?" 

" Chalmers," I replied ; " I did not dream that he 
was within a hundred miles of London. Where can I 
see or hear him ? " 

Alas ! he had already left town, and hardly a day 
had elapsed before the public journals announced that 
he had died suddenly on his return home. I had thus 
lost the opportunity of hearing the last sermon in Lon- 
don, if not the last sermon anywhere, of that eloquent 



36 A FRAGMENT 

and excellent man. Among all the lost opportunities 
of my first visit to Europe there was hardly one which 
I reg-retted so much. 

I did not fail, however, during this and other visits 
to Eno-land to hear and to know some of her most dis- 
tinguished preachers. Webster had once told me that 
of all the speakers he heard in the British Parliament 
none impressed him so much for simplicity, clearness, 
directness, and force as Sir James Graham in the House 
of Commons, and Blomfield, Bishop of London, in the 
House of Lords. He gave me a letter to Blomfield, 
and I dined with him, and was at his house more than 
once. I heard him make a short speech in the House 
of Lords and preach a good sermon at St. George's, 
Hanover Square. He reminded me of my own former 
Rector, Dr. John Sylvester John Gardiner, of Trinity 
Church, Boston, who was born in England and was a 
pupil of Dr. Parr. A fine voice, distinct articulation, 
and dignified manner gave a tone of authority to all he 
said, heightening the effect of strong sense and a clas- 
sical style. He was eminently direct, as Webster said ; 
not a word or illustration aside from the purpose. 

WiLBERFORCE, then Bishop of Oxford, afterward of 
Winchester, had far more of rhetorical grace and art. 
He was long the foremost orator of the bench of 
bishops, and it was often difficult to get a seat where 
it w\as known he was to preach. I breakfasted with 
him soon after my arrival in London in 1847. As he 
had written the history of ''The American Church," 
and was familiar with the earliest New England annals, 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPUY. 37 

he more than once made it a subject of comment 
and of congratulation that the lineal descendants of 
Governor Winthrop, the Puritan, had long since got 
back into the Episcopal fold. When I was in England 
the second time, I made special application to him for 
a seat at the church where he was to preach, and the 
following characteristic note to one of the vestry or 
clergy of St. Peter's will tell with what result : — 

26 Pall Mall, Saturday, June 9. 

My dear Mr. Fuller, — Will you kindly send one line 
with order of admission for two ladies and one gentleman 
to-morrow, for some tip-top American friends of mine, to the 
Hon. Rob. Winthrop, the Albermarle Hotel ? 

I am most sincerely yours, S. OxoN. 

Of course I had an excellent seat and was greatly 
gratified. The sermon was a most impressive and 
admirable appeal for some charitable object, and 
afforded me a striking proof of the bishop's pulpit 
eloquence. But I afterward heard a still more effec- 
tive utterance of his in the House of Lords of an 
entirely different character. It was a speech in reply 
to the Duke of Argyll on the disestablishment of the 
Irish Church. Louf^fellow and I were too^ether on the 
steps of the throne, and were deeply impressed by 
the force and dignity of the Duke's speech. Wilber- 
force was powerful and eloquent, also ; but his speech 
had nothing of the bishop except the lawn sleeves, 
and was as personal and pungent a piece of stump- 
speaking as we could have heard in our own land. 
Longfellow well said that the Duke was more like a 



38 A FRAGMENT 

bishop in that debate. But Wilberforce had great 
quaUties both as a prelate and a statesman, and was a 
dehghtful companion, endeared to all who knew him. 
He was a younger son of the renowned and revered 
philanthropist William Wilberforce, whose celebrity 
was wide enough and enduring enough to distinguish 
a whole family for a dozen generations. But he early 
extricated himself from the often oppressive shadow of 
a great paternal or ancestral name, and asserted his 
individual title to an exalted place both in the eccle- 
siastical and the civil history of his country. Indeed, 
few prelates of the English Church, in our own day or in 
any other day, took a more conspicuous stand or enjoyed 
a wider and more deserved distinction. His successor 
in the See of Winchester, De. Harold Browne, I also 
knew and greatly liked. 

One of the most notable prelates whom I knew in 
1847 was Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin. 
I met him first at a breakfast at Nassau W. Senior's, 
to whom Webster had given me a letter. When I 
entered the room, where the other guests had arrived 
before me, I saw a tall gaunt figure, in a straight- 
bodied coat, with tightly gaitered legs and an apron 
appended to his waistcoat, standing with his back to 
the fire and holding up a small puppy by the nape of 
its neck, upon which he was discoursing most humor- 
ously. I was hardly prepared for meeting one of the 
great thinkers and writers of the English Church in 
such an attitude. But Whately had a vein of drollery 
which could not be controlled, and which he did not 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 39 

care to control. He was full of anecdote and witty 
repartee during the breakfast, and made me quite at 
home with him by his personal cordiality and kindness. 
He insisted on taking me to my hotel, after breakfast 
was over, in his chariot, and made me promise to come 
and see him in Dublin, if I should cross over to 
Ireland in the sunnner. 

I met him next at a big dinner at the Marquis of 
Lansdowne's (then President of the Council), where 
several Cabinet ministers were present. It was pleasant 
and sumptuous, but had a little of the coldness and for- 
mality which might be imagined in a banquet hall 
almost lined with antique marble statues. Whately, 
however, did not fail to " set the table in a roar " now 
and then, until he retired with Lady Lansdowne and 
the other ladies, while the gentlemen remained for half 
an hour to try the qualities of the Lansdowne cellar. 
When we went up to the drawing-room I found the 
Archbishop, with cards and scissors in hand, lecturing 
on the principle of the hoomerang, cutting out little semi- 
circular strips and blowing or snapping them so as to 
make them return upon his own nose or head. He 
was in great glee, and the ladies quite wild with 
merriment. 

When I was in Dublin, a few months afterward, 
Whately accompanied me through Trinity College 
and took me also to visit the ^National Schools of 
Ireland, where Bible lessons, arranged by him and the 
Roman Catholic Archbishop, were daily read. He 
was specially proud of having been the means of 
bringing about such a reconciliation of the Protestant 



40 A FRAGMENT 

and Catholic children, so that the Bible should be 
read to them both. But, alas ! this reconciliation was 
short-lived, and dissensions and jealousies soon put an 
end to the arrangement. The volume containing these 
Bible lessons is still in my possession, given me by 
Whately himself, and I cannot but hope that some- 
thing of the same sort may be found permanently 
practicable on this side of the Atlantic, if not on that. 
Whately gave me several other books. It happened 
that while I was studying law with Webster, Whately's 
Rhetoric had been recently printed, and Webster 
came into the office one morning and said : " Winthrop, 
have you read the essay on rhetoric by Archbishop 
Whately ? If not, get it and read it at once. It is 
worth all the classics on that subject." I found an 
opportunity to tell this to Whately ; and the next day 
he sent me the latest editions both of his Rhetoric and 
Loo-ic, with a kind note. He sent me at the same 
time several copies of two separate pamphlets, in 
which were comprised all the alterations and addi- 
tions which he had made in his new edition, begging 
me to give them to any persons in the United States 
who were interested in his works. He told me 
these pamphlets of "alterations and additions" were 
printed, at his own cost, for gratuitous distribution, 
as he preferred to be read correctly rather than to 
make money out of new editions. He complained that 
our publishers not only printed all his works, but did 
not take the pains to make the changes, — sometimes 
putting second or third edition on the titlepage, with- 
out any reference to the corrections or new matter 
which these editions contained. 



OF AUTOBIOGRArnY. 41 

Whately was proud of having so large a number of 
American readers, and said there was only one of his 
books which had not been reprinted in the United 
States, and of which he had not himself obtained an 
American edition. This was the " Essay on the Diffi- 
culties of the Writings of Saint Paul." It has been 
printed at Andover since his death. "If I could 
have," said he, " a penny a volume on all the copies 
of my books printed in America, I should be far richer 
than I ever have been from the See of Dublin." He 
asked me to take some of his books to Alonzo Potter, 
Bishop of Pennsylvania, of whom he expressed the very 
highest opinion, and for whom he had formed a warm 
friendship ; and he continued to send me his pamphlets 
for many years after my return to America, and 
almost to the time of his own death. 

If it be true, as has been said, that Whately became 
in his old age a convert to modern Spiritualism, it is 
only a j)roof how the strongest intellect and clearest 
perception and solid est common-sense may be betrayed 
by that passion for novelties which is the besetting sin 
of ambitious souls. He loved notoriety, and was will- 
ing to be remarked upon for eccentricity rather than 
not to be remarked upon at all. Yet, take him for all 
in all, few English prelates have contributed more to 
the cause of religious, moral, and intellectual advance- 
ment. I never heard him preach, but his little volumes 
of sermons, as a curate, on a " Future State " and on 
" Good and Evil Angels," show how instructive a 
preacher he must have been. 



42 A FRAGMENT 

Whately was succeeded in the See of Dublin by 
Trench, whom I knew while he was Dean of West- 
minster, and whom I heard preach in the Abbey. 
Meeting Rufus Choate, so long the leader of our Bos- 
ton Bar, one day in State Street, he said : " What are 
you reading ? Stop at Little & Brown's and get a 
copy of the Hulsean Lectures by Richard Chenevix 
Trench. There is nothing of late days equal to them 
for richness of style and grandeur of thought." From 
that time I read everything of Trench's, — prose and 
poetry, sacred and secular, — the " Parables " and 
"Miracles," the Essays on Words and on Proverbs, the 
Life of Calderon, the poems, and first of all, of course, 
the Hulsean Lectures. I thus knew him almost as well 
before breakfasting at his table, and being with him an 
hour in the " Jerusalem Chamber," as after enjoying 
such opportunities of conversing with him personally. 
His sermon at Westminster Abbey was excellent, but 
not so impressive in delivery as I had anticipated. In 
conversation and in books he was greater than in preach- 
ing. He was a marvellous master of words and style, 
and his thoughts were often powerful and his illustra- 
tions brilliant; but his magnetism seemed to evaporate 
before he ascended the pulpit. I remember meeting 
him again at Oxford (when he took the degree of 
Doctor of Laws in company with my friend George 
Peabody, the philanthropist, and when I sat next to 
him at the Vice-Chancellor's dinner), and again in 
London, in 1874, when his health was failing. 

I recall that on the other side of me at the Yice- 
Chancellor's table was Mansel, the author of the 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 43 

" Limitations of Religious Thought," a profound meta- 
physical work, and who was afterward Dean of St. 
Paul's. Ardent, joyous, full of anecdote and clever 
repartee, Mansel seemed to have before him a long 
career of intellectual activity ; but he had hardly 
succeeded Milman at St. Paul's, in less than three 
years after I had known him, when he was struck 
with apoplexy and died. 

Milman I knew in the cloisters of Westminster 
Abbey in 1847, when he was a canon, and met him 
often at his own house and at other houses at each 
succeeding visit to London. Webster had given me a 
note to his charming wife, whom everybody admired 
and loved, and they were both full of kindness to me. 
His great historical works on Christianity and the Jews 
are as well known in our country as in his own. His 
"Martyrs of Antioch" have furnished a sweet and 
touching hymn for many a funeral service. His " Fazio " 
has supplied a character (Bianca) for Fanny Kemble's 
most powerful impersonation ; nothing in Shakspeare 
gave more scope to her genius. But those who have 
not known him in the cloisters of Westminster or in 
the Deanery of St. Paul's have not known him at all. 
Full of information and eager to impart it, with nothing 
of bigotry or intolerance, quiet in manner, genial in 
temper, given to hospitality, he attracted the best 
and most accomplished men of all professions, and 
seemed always happy in making others happy. The 
last time I saw him he took me to afternoon service at 
the cathedral ; and though his form was so bent and 



44 A FRAGMENT 

bowed by infirmity that T might have feared lest each 
step should be his last, his eye was as bright, and his 
brow as earnest, and his voice as cheery, and his kind- 
ness as assiduous as if he were still in his prime. He 
was spared to complete " The Annals of St. Paul's," 
and to direct the execution of his cherished plans for 
the restoration of the grand cathedral ; and in view of 
all he did in this regard, we might almost as well say 
of him as of its architect, " Si monumentum quseris, 
circumspice." 

Two of the most interesting and valuable additions 

to historical and antiquarian literature in our time are 

"The Annals of St. Paul's," by Milman, and "The 

Annals of Westminster Abbey," by Dean Stanley. 

The name of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley was early 

known in this country as well as in England by his 

admirable life of his great master, Dr. Thomas Arnold 

of Rugby, — a name never to be pronounced without 

respect and almost veneration, but a name hardly ever 

heard of out of England until Stanley introduced it 

to us and won for himself the honor of an able and 

faithful biographer of a really great and good man. 

Stanley subsequently added many new claims to the 

consideration and respect of the literary and religious 

world. His " Sinai and Palestine," his " Memorials of 

Canterbury," and his lectures on the Jewish Church, 

as well as his " Annals of Westminster Abbey," have 

been read and highly valued on both sides of the 

Atlantic ; while his liberal views, and the independence 

with which he advocated them, deservedly made him a 



OF AUTOBIOGKAPHT. 45 

leader of advanced thought in the Church. He seemed 
to me peculiarly an apostle of Christian fraternity, — 
of that brotherly love which has so happily supplanted 
the odium theologicum of former times. 

Meeting him first at a breakfast at Trench's in ISGO? 
I had frequent opportunities from that time until his 
death, alike at his house, in my own, and elsewhere, 
to appreciate the exceeding charm of his personal 
intercourse. I had the good fortune once to be pres- 
ent at Westminster Abbey when he delivered a 
memorable sermon, prompted by three events of no 
little interest at least to Englishmen, — the thirtieth 
anniversary of the Queen's coronation ; the escape of 
the Duke of Edinburgh from an attempted assassina- 
tion ; and the safe return of Lord Napier of Magdala 
and his army from their brief but decisive campaign 
in Abyssinia. The Abbey was crowded. The Prince 
and Princess of Wales and many others of the royal 
family were present. The choral service was brilliant, 
and the grand organ thundered forth the National 
Anthem most impressively. The slight figure, quiet 
manner, and simple style of the preacher were in 
striking contrast with the surroundings, and furnished 
welcome proof that he was incapable of being betrayed 
into any mere sensational rhetoric, or of being diverted 
from a plain, practical enforcement of the moral and 
religious lessons of the hour. He felt, and made 
others feel, that he was speaking in the presence and 
as the servant of One above all earthly heroes or 
princes. 

The recent admirable life of him by Dean Bradley 



46 A FRAGMENT 

and Mr. Prothero cannot fail to enhance the affection- 
ate veneration with which his memory will henceforth 
be regarded by all who are capable of properly appre- 
ciating his exalted character. A somewhat elaborate 
tribute which I paid him at the time of his death is to 
be found in the fourth volume of my Addresses and 
Speeches, and I resist the temptation to reprint pas- 
sages from it here. I always remember with especial 
pleasure my constant intercourse with him in Paris, 
in 1875, when his devoted wife. Lady Augusta, was 
so ill at Madame Mold's, as well as the week he sub- 
sequently passed in my house at Brookline. 

Among my English friends and correspondents there 
have been none for whom I have felt a warmer per- 
sonal regard than for Lord Arthur Heryey, Bishop 
of Bath and Wells (still, I rejoice, surviving), and the 
late John Sinclair, long Archdeacon of Middlesex 
and Vicar of Kensington. 

Before his elevation to the episcopate, a quarter of 
a century ago. Lord Arthur held the family living 
of Ickworth in Suffolk, and was for some years Arch- 
deacon of Sudbury. Some of his lectures at the Bury 
Athenaeum, and some of his contributions to the published 
Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, bore 
testimony to his accomplishments and culture at that 
period. Since then he has become widely known as 
the successful administrator of an important diocese, as 
the author of charges to his clergy replete with dig- 
nity and wisdom, as an influential member of the Com- 
mission for Revising the Holy Scriptures, and as the 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 47 

writer of a remarkable course of lectures upon the au- 
thenticity of St. Luke's Gospel. I have had repeated 
opportunities for appreciating the charm of his do- 
mestic circle both amid the pleasing rural scenery 
of Ickworth Rectory and the picturesque surroundings 
of the episcopal palace at Wells. It was while on 
a visit to him at Wells that I first met his neighbor, 
the historian Freeman. 

Archdeacon Sinclair brought me a note of introduc- 
tion when he came over with Bishop Spencer and others 
many years ago to attend the Triennial Convention of 
the Protestant Episcopal Church at New York. Almost 
immediately on receiving him, I ventured to inquire 
whether he were not a son of that Sir John Sinclair 
who corresponded with Washington on agriculture ; 
and on his replying in the affirmative, I said, ^'I sup- 
pose you have an abundance of copies of that corre- 
spondence as printed long ago in England ? " " Not 
one," said he; "we have given them all away from 
time to time, and I have not even saved a cop}' for my- 
self." " Then," said I, " perhaps you will accept this 
copy from me," taking one from the table at my side, 
w^liere I had a dozen of them which had just been sent 
to me as a Trustee of the Massachusetts Agricultural 
Society, by whom a new edition had been printed for 
distribution as prizes that very year. It was a striking 
coincidence, and amused and gratified us both. Since 
then I twice visited him at his pleasant vicarage of 
Kensington, and at least once partook the Communion 
from his hands in old Kensington church, which has 
now disappeared for a new one. Among the persons 



48 A FRAGMENT 

I met at his table were two of his sisters, — Miss 
Catharine Sinclair, whose writings are so well known, 
and the Dowager Countess of Glasgow, — Lord Chan- 
cellor Hatherley, then Sir William Page Wood, and 
others whose names have escaped me ; and I owed to 
him an introduction to the late Lady Holland, and 
several charming visits to Holland House, as well as to 
Dean Ramsay and other friends of his in Edinburgh. 
There never beat in human bosom a kinder heart than 
in that of the good Archdeacon. His sermons and 
charges, of which he sent me not a few, were full of 
good sense as well as of religious instruction. Suc- 
cessive bishops of London leaned on him for support. 
Macaulay was one of his parishioners. Some sketches 
of eminent men whom he had known, printed for 
private circulation only, were excellent. Without pre- 
tensions to the graces of oratory, simple and natural 
in expression and delivery, the one sermon I heard 
from him was admirably adapted to a Communion 
Sunday, and prepared us all for partaking in the 
right spirit of that simplest, solemnest feast. 

I may not forget, in this connection, that I have been 
in the company of three successive Archbishops of 
Canterbury. Of the earliest (Sumner), in 1847, I saw 
but little, and was only presented to him formally. Of 
the two others I have happily been privileged to know 
more. A delightful afternoon at Lambeth with Long- 
fellow, accompanied by the ladies of our party, is fresh 
in my memory. Longley was then Primate, and a 
more charming old man has rarely been seen. I had 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 49 

heard him preach forcibly and eloquently ten or twelve 
years before in Paris, while he was Bishop of Ripon. 
Since then he had been Archbishop of York for a very 
brief term, — giving room for the hon mot of Punch, 
" Longley, Archbishop of York ; Shortly, Archbishop of 
Canterbury." He was a favorite at Court, as he de- 
served to be for his piety and excellence, and the earli- 
est opportunity was taken to make him Primate. He 
was full of kindness in taking us into the old Lambeth 
chapel and showing us where the first American bishop 
was consecrated ; and he sent his son with us to the top 
of the Lollard's Tower, with its interesting historical 
associations, and its exquisite view of London and the 
Thames, the shipping and the bridges. Some of the 
ladies were but too well satisfied to remain below and 
enjoy his delightful conversation. He died soon after 
our return to America, universally respected and 
beloved. 

His successor, Dr. Tait, I had previously known as 
Bishop of London ; and in x^y address at Plymouth in 
1870, on the 250th Anniversary of the Landing of the 
Pilgrims, I was led, in speaking of the Bradford Manu- 
script, to give some account of visits to him at Fulham, 
since which time I have repeatedly been his guest at 
Lambeth Palace, and have been invited to stay with him 
at Addington. A man of the greatest simplicity of 
manner and character. Dr. Tait seemed to me as well 
calculated to win hearts to the Church and to Christ as 
any one 1 had ever known. The apparent feebleness of 
his health only added to his attractions, though there 



50 A FRAGMENT 

was nothing feeble in his tone. Eminently prudent, 
conciliatory, liberal, and wise, he seemed made for pre- 
siding over the councils of the English Church at a 
moment when a stern or bigoted policy must have cost 
a breach, if not a schism. I never heard him preach, 
but I was present during the first debate on the Bill 
for disestablishing the Irish Church, when he rose 
about midnight and made one of the most admirable 
and impressive speeches to which I have ever listened. 
Advancing to the middle of that magnificent chamber, 
crowded with all that was most distinguished in rank, 
statesmanship, literature, and theology, without notes 
and with no evidence of formal preparation, he dis- 
cussed the policy of the bill with a moderation, a 
clearness, a precision, and a power which were worthy 
of his position and of the solemnity of the occasion ; 
and I could say of Tait, as Webster said of his 
predecessor in the See of London (Blomfield), that I 
heard nothins: better of its kind in either House of 
Parliament. His death, fourteen years later, was a 
great public loss. 

I must not omit to allude to my slight acquaintance, 
in 1847, with the venerable Dr. Vernon- Harcourt, 
then Archbishop of York, who told me that he saw 
Webster for only a few minutes, but that in that brief 
interview he learned more about the American Consti- 
tution than in all the rest of his life. My own inter- 
view with him, alas, was as brief as Webster's, and 
left only the impression of a grand old prelate, ripe for 
the translation which he soon experienced, whose noble 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 51 

monument in York Cathedral I saw on my next visit 
to England. From two of his sons, both members of 
the House of Commons, Colonel George Harcourt, of 
Nuneham, and Granville Vernon, I received polite at- 
tentions. The former became, somewhat late in life, 
the third husband of the famous Frances, Countess 
Waldegrave; and the latter was the father of a charm- 
ing woman, the second wife of my friend and remote 
connection, Humphrey Mildmay. 

Nor can I fail to recall the kindness which I received 
in 1847 and afterward from the late Lord Lansdowne, 
to whom I have already passingly alluded. He was 
hardly a great statesman, but he had elements of char- 
acter which are even better than greatness. Frank, 
honest, cordial, genial, he was the man of all others for 
a President of the Council, and seemed eminently calcu- 
lated to influence the course of government by persua- 
sion rather than by force ; to be always ready with 
conciliatory explanations, to temper and control the 
extravagances of party leaders, and to preside over 
public ceremonials and administer official hospitalities. 

After breakfasting tete-a-tete with him on one occa- 
sion, he took me in his carriage to see one of the 
" Home and Colonial Juvenile and Teachers' Schools " 
in which he was interested, and gave me a number of 
the school-books to bring home for comparison with 
our own. But some of these books were really our omi, 
though not perhaps under the name of the American 
author. There was a great power of appropriation, assi- 
milation, and digestion among the commoner sort of 



52 A FRAGMENT 

English book-makers, and they did not always give 
credit for what they borrowed, still less for what they 
stole. We have been dishonest enough in the matter 
of copyright, but when we reprint, we at least acknow- 
ledge the authorship to belong elsewhere. 

Lord Lansdowne kindly invited me to be his guest at 
Bowood after the rising of Parliament, and promised me 
a meeting with Tom Moore; but I had then never been 
on the Continent, and had much to do and see before 
returning home for the ensuing session of Congress. T 
less regretted not meeting Moore as he was fast becom- 
ing a wreck, and little but the name of the charming 
poet and songster was left. I was similarly obliged to 
forego visits to Lord Ashburton at the Grange, and to 
Evelyn Denison at Ossington ; but I found time for a 
pious pilgrimage (the first of several) to the home of 
my ancestors at Groton, in Suffolk, in which neighbor- 
hood I was hospitably entertained by Richard Almack, 
of Long Melford, a leading member of the Society of 
Antiquaries, the possessor of an exceptional store of 
local information, who, from that time until his death in 
1875, was one of my most valued friends and correspon- 
dents. I found time, also, in the course of a flying trip 
through Scotland, to pass a couple of days with Web- 
ster's friend, the nineteenth Earl of Morton, at Dal- 
mahoy House, near Edinburgh. Lady Morton and her 
dauditers were full of kindness ; and this brief experi- 
ence of Scottish hospitality caused me additional regret 
at having been constrained to decline an invitation from 
the Duke of Richmond to Gordon Castle, and from the 
Earl of Aberdeen to Haddo House. 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPUY. 53 

Everett had given me a letter to Lord Aberdeen, 
who gave a dinner for me which I came very near miss- 
ing. I had ventured to go down to see the great 
Derby race on the same day, and found much difficulty 
in getting back in season, owing to the crowd. It would 
have been a serious loss, as the guests included Lord 
Canning, Sir James Graham, Lord Ashburton, Sir 
Robert Gordon, Count Jarnac, the French Minister, and 
other persons of note. 

Lord Aberdeen struck me as one of the most sensible 
men in England, — grave, thoughtful, prudent, with no 
pretension or ostentation. He and Everett had a great 
liking for one another, and he sat to Harding for a por- 
trait, which was in Everett's library till his death. 
With his youngest son, the well-known Sir Arthur 
Gordon, recently created Lord Stanmore, I had some 
pleasant intercourse at a later period. 

Pakenham, then British Minister at Washington, had 
given me a letter to the third Earl of St. Germans, 
a former Postmaster-General in Peel's Cabinet, pre- 
viously associated with a mission of mercy to Spain in 
1835, when he most successfully negotiated with the 
two parties to the civil war for an exchange of pris- 
oners, and was the immediate instrument of saving the 
lives of others at the peril of his own. He was the 
lineal descendant of that great parliamentary leader. 
Sir John Eliot, the friend of Hampden, of whom the 
late John Forster wrote so instructive a biography, by 
which it seems that Governor Winthrop's reasons for 
coming to New England were the subject of considera- 



54 A FRAGMENT 

tion and correspondence between Eliot and Hampden 
while Eliot was imprisoned in the Tower. 

I remember visiting the Tower in company with 
Lady St. Germans and her son Granville Eliot (who 
fell in the Crimean campaign), and we lingered in the 
room where this great martyr of bold and free speech 
died. Lady St. Germans was a granddaughter of Lord 
Cornwallis, and one day when I had been dining with 
her husband he showed me the sword of Tippoo Saib, 
which Cornwallis captured in India, — adding pleasantly 
that he was not able to show me the sword Cornwallis 
wore at Yorktown, as he unfortunately lost it ! 

Lord St. Germans was subsequently Lord-Lieutenant 
of Ireland and Lord Steward of the Queen's household, 
in which latter capacity he accompanied the Prince of 
Wales to the United States. Nothing could exceed his 
repeated kindness to me and mine, and our friendship 
ended only with his death in 1877. Lady St. Germans, 
a most amiable and excellent woman, died on the very 
day (it has been said) on which her son's regiment 
entered London in triumph on its return from the 
Crimea, and when a fresh sense of her bereavement 
was forced upon her already shattered health. 

My passing allusion to Sir Richard Pakenham recalls 
our intimacy while I was in Congress and he Minister 
at Washington. He was a frank, hearty, honest Irish- 
man, with no diplomatic reserve or equivoque about 
him, with no superabundance of accomplishment, but 
with talent and experience enough to do his work ad- 
vantageously for England and acceptably for our gov- 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 65 

ernment. His predecessor was another bachelor, Henry 
Stephen Fox (nephew of Charles James Fox), whose 
eccentricities were the laugh of Washington when I 
first entered Congress. Rising generally when other 
people were almost ready to go to bed, when a ceremony 
or a duty compelled him to an earlier appearance. Fox 
was like an owl in the daytime. " How strange," said 
he to Madame Calderon, one morning at a State 
funeral, — " how strange we look to each other by 
daylight ! " I stood near him at the inauguration of 
President William Henry Harrison in 1841, and shall 
never forget how like a figure of fun he looked, with 
a uniform which he had outgrown, and which he had 
probably brought from Brazil, his white cassimere 
trousers barely reaching his ankles, and his chapcau de 
bras tawny with time and use ! As Harrison alluded to 
foreign nations, Fox, as dofjen of the diplomatic corps, 
advanced slowly toward him ; but before he could get 
near enough to hear, the President had changed his 
topic to " our brethren, the red men." The expression, 
half smile and half chagrin, which came over Fox's face 
at that moment, as he fell back into the throng, defies 
description. His debts compelled him to economy, and 
he rarely gave dinners. A year or two before 1 knew 
him, he had invited a large party to his house, — Mr. 
Clay, Mr. Calhoun, Mr. Webster, and all the giants (for 
there were giants in those days), — and when they 
were all assembled, he said, " Gentlemen, now be good 
enough to put on your hats and follow me." And thus 
saying, he led the way to a neighboring eating-house ! 
But he was an agreeable and accomplished man, with a 



56 A FRAGMENT 

noble head and a ready wit ; and nobody could have 
been more agreeable than he was at a little dinner 
given for the historian Prescott by our friend Calderon 
de la Barca, the Spanish Minister. His death at 
Washington from an overdose of opium sufficiently 
revealed the secret of his oddity, — if, indeed, it had 
been a secret to any one who saw and knew him. 

Pakenham had not a particle of Fox's peculiarity, 
and rendered himself all the more acceptable by the 
contrast. It happened that he was in Ireland on leave 
when I visited Dublin in 1847 ; and as I could not 
accept his pressing invitation to go to him in the 
country, he came to Dublin and spent four or five 
days with me. We drove to Donnybrook Fair 
together in a jaunting car, and the next day to 
Castletown (the j^rincely seat of his cousin. Colonel 
Connolly), and the day after drove through the 
Powerscourt demesne in the beautiful county Wicklow. 
We dined together, too, with Lord Clarendon, then 
Lord-Lieutenant, at the Vice-regal Lodge in Phoenix 
Park, and at Sir Philip Crampton's at Lough Bray. 
Thus the only regret I had at being unable to visit 
him was from losing the promised privilege of seeing 
Miss Edgeworth, the authoress, w^ho was a near 
neighbor and friend of his. At home or abroad, at 
Washington or in Dublin, Sir Richard was a delightful 
companion, and his constant kindness attached me 
strongly to him. 

Nor can I say much less of Sir John Ckampton, who 
succeeded Sir Richard, and who was the son of Sir 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 57 

Philip, my host at Lough Bray. The latter, by the 
way, was a great surgeon, and had been medical adviser 
to all the Lord-Lieutenants for nearly half a century. 
Among others he had attended the Marquis of Welles- 
ley, and had been intimate with him and our American 
Mrs. Patterson at the time of their courtship and mar- 
riage. I should not venture to put on paper his 
account of their love passages, which were at once 
comic and pathetic. Sir Philip looked younger than 
his son, whose premature white hairs when lie came 
to Washington suggested sixty instead of forty. The 
frost was only on the outside, however, and he had not 
a little amiability as well as ability. 

After Crampton came Sir Henry Bulwer, afterward 
Lord Bailing, the very impersonation of diplomacy, — 
artful, accomplished, capable of intrigue, not afflicted 
with scruples, though a valetudinarian in all other 
respects ; a man of real talent and of many agreeable 
qualities, a charming writer and a good speaker, whose 
compliments at public dinners were always gracefully 
turned. 

After Bulwer came Lord Napier, not inferior to Bul- 
wer in the arts of diplomacy, superior to him in the 
graces, and of a personal figure and address quite fasci- 
nating. He was a man of great elegance, and rendered 
himself exceedingly agreeable in social life. His little 
speech at the Harvard festival, while I was President of 
the Alumni, was one of the most felicitous I ever heard. 
His admiration for Washington Allston's coloring was 



58 A FRAGMENT 

unbounded. He told me repeatedly that no other 
living artist of any country could have painted such 
pictures; and he tried hard to persuade the British 
Government to purchase one for the National Gallery 
in London. Lord Napier had himself written a book 
on modern Italian art, of which I have a copy, though 
not of his gift, for he said he was ashamed of it, and 
would not let me see it. He gave me, however, an 
interesting biography of his ancestor, the great master 
of Napier and author of Logarithms, by his cousin the 
late Mark Napier. Lord Napier was a delightful com- 
panion during a summer which I passed with him at 
the Nahant hotel, where I formed the acquaintance of 
his lovely wife, — one of the most saintly persons I 
have ever known, as full of goodness of heart as of 
grace and sweetness of manner, and whose image will 
always have a place in my little gallery of cherished 
memories. 

The Napiers were followed by Lord Lyons, an 
excellent man of business, a bachelor, and wholly 
wedded to his profession, — a plain, blunt, genial 
Englishman, with not a little touch of the sailor 
manner, which he may have caught from the Admiral 
his father. I had long been out of Congress when 
he was at Washington, but met him frequently else- 
where, and dined at least once with him there at his 
own table, when Everett and I went on to present a 
memorial for peace just before the Civil War. I dined 
with him afterward in Paris, where he was long 
Ambassador, and in London, after he had retired 



OF AUTOBIOGKAPHY. 59 

from that post. An ancestor of his, Capt. Henry 
Lyons, of Antigua, married a granddaughter of Gov- 
ernor Winthrop's son Samuel, who was himself Deputy- 
Governor of Antigua, so that we called ourselves 
kinsmen. 

He was, if I mistake not, a minister of more practical 
ability than any England had sent to America since Mr. 
Stratford Canning, the late" Lord Stratford de Red- 
clifFe, whom I also knew and with whom I remember 
dining in 1867. He then had a great desire to talk 
about his old friend John Quincy Adams, who was 
our Secretary of State while he was Minister at 
Washington. A man of grand presence, somewhat 
stern and stately, he knew how to unbend gracefully, 
and was long one of the most impressive and interest- 
ino; fio-ures in the House of Lords. The recent bio- 
graphy of him, by Stanley Lane Poole, does no more 
than justice to his really great career and character, 
and, as Dean Stanley truly said in a sermon in West- 
minster Abbey the day after his funeral: "No one 
could enter into his presence, either as he sat on what 
may be called his throne at Constantinople, or during 
the long years of his dignified retirement, without 
feeling that they had seen a king of men." 

Lord Lyons was succeeded at Washington by Sir 
Frederick Bruce, an amiable and excellent man, 
whose diplomatic career was cut short by his much- 
regretted death in Boston, after a short illness. T 
had previously known his elder brothers : Lord Elgin, 
when Governor-General of Canada, and General Robeht 



60 A FRAGMENT 

Bruce, when head of the Prince of Wales's household. 
All three brothers made a very agreeable impression 
in society, both at home and abroad. 

Of English men of letters I have already mentioned 
Rogers and Wordsworth, Hallam and Milman, but 
I must not forget Earl Stanhope, the historian, — 
Lord Mahon, as he was when I first knew him, — a 
laborious student and an earnest seeker after truth, 
whose works will always be consulted for their substan- 
tial merits, and as valuable authorities on the subjects 
to which they relate. My relations with him and his 
charming wife were particularly pleasant, and I was 
among the many who mourned the untimely death of 
his attractive daughter, the late Lady Beauchamp. 

At a breakfast at Stanhope's one of the guests was 
Thackeray, whom I had known in America, when he 
was more than once at my house. I always associate 
him with a visit I paid my dear friend, John Pendleton 
Kennedy, in Washington, where he was then Secretary 
of the Navy, and while Washington Irving was my 
only fellow-guest. One dinner at Kennedy's, with 
Irving, Thackeray, and Tom Corwin, lingers in my 
memory. Wit, humor, anecdote, reminiscence, and 
sparkling merriment abounded to overflowing. Thack- 
eray was .approaching his end when I met him at 
Lord Stanhope's, and ominous shadows were gathering 
over his brow. He apologized for not calling upon 
me on account of infirmities, but begged me to come to 
see him before I left London. I did so, and found 
him, as he said, "taking his first tea and toast for 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 61 

many days." His daughter was ministering to him, 
and he seemed really ill. His somewhat cynical tem- 
perament was not, however, wholly subdued. " Do 
you know an American named Allibone ? " said he. 
" He has sent me a big Dictionary, and wants me to 
acknowledge it ; but I have not done it, and do not 
mean to." I told him I knew Dr. Allibone well, and 
valued him highly ; that his Dictionary of Authors 
was a work of great labor, and as useful in its way 
as the Dictionnaire des Contempondm of Vapereau ; and 
that the author was, like Vapereau, one of the most 
obliging of men. " I thank you, I thank you," said 
he, instantly, " for this explanation. I will write to 
him at once, and make amends for my neglect." And 
he did write to him in a cordial and complimentary 
style, as I subsequently learned from Allibone him- 
self. Thackeray's cynicism was only skin-deep. He 
had a large heart below. 

I did not meet Dickens in England, though I had 
seen much of him at Washin<i!;ton duringr his first visit 
to America.^ He then brousrht me a letter of intro- 
duction from Mr. Everett, our Minister to England, 
while I was keeping house at Washington with Kennedy, 
Kennedy and I called at once and asked him to dine ; 
but he had made his eno-ao-ements long^ before his 
arrival at Washington, and was obliged to refuse all 
new invitations. He thus refused to dine at the 
President's and at Ex-President John Quincy Adams's, 
so that we lesser notabilities had no cause to complain. 

1 I was iQ Europe when he came last. 



62 A FRAGMENT 

I dined with him at Mayor Seaton's, when Mrs. Madison, 
Clay, and Webster were among the guests, and after- 
ward took him and Mrs. Dickens to the President's 
reception, where we revolved around the East Room 
together, Dickens on one side of me and his wife on 
the other, and they were the observed of all observers. 
As we were leaving, the colored drivers on the portico 
shouted, "Lord Boz's carriage! Lord Boz's carriage ! " 
to our great amusement. John Quincy Adams did 
not appreciate Dickens. He told me at his own table 
that, understanding Dickens had letters to him, he had 
been trying to prepare himself to meet him, and at 
his daughter-in-law's suggestion had taken up the 
'^ Pickwick Papers." " But," said Mr. Adams, " I could 
not get beyond a few chapters. He has a wonderful 
faculty of description ; but the difficulty is, the things 
are not worth describing ! " And then Mr. Adams 
launched out into unbounded praise of Fielding, saying 
that there was no novel like " Tom Jones." 

One day — it was Saturday — while Dickens was in 
Washington, Mr. Adams turned to me and said, '' I 
want you to do me a favor, Mr. Winthrop. You, I 
know, do not go to dinners, and I do not give them, 
on Sundays. But Mr. Dickens, having refused my 
invitation for a dinner next week, has written to say 
that he wishes the privilege of coming to luncheon 
with his wife to-morrow at two o'clock. Now, I have 
no idea of meeting him alone, and I want you and Mr. 
Saltonstall to come to my aid." So we both went at 
the hour named. Mrs. Adams had ordered an elaborate 
lunch, and courses were served as for a dinner. Mr. 



OF AUTOBIOGKAPnY. 63 

and Mrs. Dickens not only came late, but before the 
meats had been finished, said they must go home and 
dress for a dinner at the house of a translator in the 
State Department ; and the table of the Ex-President 
was broken up accordingly ! It was a curious instance 
of the infelicity of the " previous engagements " into 
which Mr. Dickens had been betrayed by officious 
friends. He seemed rather to prefer dining with 
reporters and newspaper men than with persons in 
official position, and he occasionally exhibited a 
hrusquerie and waywardness — perhaps resulting from 
the flattery he had received at Boston and New York — 
which led him to put on airs in the company of men 
entitled to his respect. But his marvellous genius, 
devoted as it so often was to the cause of philanthropic 
reform, is enoudi to secure oblivion for all his infir- 
mities, — more especially when we remember how 
many of his best characters we should have lost if at 
one period of his life he had not been fond of low 
company. 

I have already mentioned hearing an eloquent 
speech from Macaulay in the House of Commons, 
and I remember sitting next but one to him at a 
dinner at Van de Weyer's, the Belgian Minister, and 
had the full benefit of his wonderful flow of conver- 
sation, — I might better say, soliloquy. When I saw 
him long afterward, he had become a peer and was 
quite retired from politics. Calling on him at Holly 
Lodge, Kensington, with a note from Everett, he pro- 
fessed to remember me perfectly, but he was suffering 



64 A FRAGMENT 

from an asthmatic cough, and had a swollen look which 
suggested dropsy. His magisterial tone and a certain 
puffy, panting respiration recalled the accounts of Dr. 
Johnson. Yet he was kind and cordial, regretting that 
he was just going out of town, and making me promise 
that I would come to see him again in the spring, 
on my return from the Continent. I had a strong pre- 
sentiment that I should not see him again ; and three 
or four months afterward, while I was in Paris, the 
telegraph announced his sudden death. An unfinished 
letter to Everett was found in the pocket of the coat 
he had worn last. The two men had many gifts and 
greatnesses in common. Everett's fame will last 
longest as a brilliant orator ; Macaulay's as a magnifi- 
cent writer, almost a second Burke. His Essays will 
be read even longer than his History, and with less 
distrust. 

Browning I have met repeatedly in London and in 
Rome, dining with him at his own table and at other 
people's tables. Everywhere he was pleasant and 
cheery, but he had but little of the poet in social life. 
He certainly reserved his brilliancy and his profound- 
ness for his verses. His wife I saw only once ; but an 
hour with her in her own charming apartment left an 
impression which I can neither forget nor describe. 

Of another hour I can recall more. It was with 
Walter Savage Landor, at his residence in Florence, 
in February, 1860. A grander old man I have rarely, 
if ever, seen. He talked much about poetry and the 
great poets of the world. He ranked them in the 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 65 

following order : Shakspeare, Milton, Homer, iEschylus. 
Not a word about Dante ! Passing to other characters, 
he placed Washington at the head of all men, and 
added that next to him, in America, was John Win- 
throp. Of course he touched my heart, both as to 
Washington and Winthrop. But I was amazed at his 
knowing anything about the latter, until he told me 
that he had held much correspondence with my old 
friend James Savage, and that incidentally he had 
become familiar with Mr. Savage's edition of the 
Governor's journal. 

Of John Kenyon, also, a name almost forgotten, 
but worthy of being recalled, I must say a word, 
Ticknor had given me a letter to him, and nothing 
could exceed his kindness. His '"' Rhymed Plea for 
Tolerance," and his "Day at Tivoli," though praised in 
" Blackwood " and by Prescott in the " North American 
Review," will hardly secure him a high place among the 
poets of his period ; but the little volumes were pretty 
keepsakes, and his friends were always glad to receive 
and read them. I certainly was. Meantime he was 
fond of gathering the choicest literary guests around 
his hospitable iDoard, and his breakfasts and dinners 
almost rivalled Rogers's. One of them cost me a great 
disappointment. He had made it especiallj' for me to 
meet Carlyle ; but at the last moment, when it was too 
late to fill the place, — if such a place could be filled. 
— illness or caprice prevented Carlyle from keeping 
his engagement, and so I never saw the old cjmic. In 
a letter to me long ago from the first Lady Ashburton, 



66 A FRAGMENT 

she said : " Carlyle and Emerson have met, but have 
discovered that they agree in nothing except in their 
admiration for each other." I am afraid that if Carlyle 
and I had met, we should hardly have reached admira- 
tion on either side. Yet his " Life of John Stirling," 
and his "French Revolution," and his "Life and 
Letters of Cromwell" are admirable in their way. 
Kenyon had a large fortune, and was munificent in 
aiding poor authors. 

Grote and Bulwer-Lytton I knew but slightly ; 
Darwin and Ruskin not at all, though Canon Farrar 
was kind enough to take me to the funeral of Darwin 
in Westminster Abbey. With Lockhart, the younger 
Lvtton, John Forster, and Samuel Warren, Q. C, the 
genial but now almost forgotten author of " Ten Thou- 
sand a Year," I was well acquainted at different 
periods. Of Froude, Kingsley, Tyndall, and Matthew 
Arnold, I saw little in their own country, though they 
all dined with me in America. To Henry Reeve, the 
accomplished editor of the " Edinburgh Review," and to 
John Murray, the prince of publishers, I am indebted for 
many kind attentions. But the English man of letters 
whom I knew longest and best was Richard Monckton 
MiLNES, Lord Houghton. I remember breakfasting 
with him in 1847, when Prince Louis Napoleon, then 
an exile in London, and Richard Cobden were among 
the guests. Houghton told me long afterward, that 
out of the intercourse between Louis Napoleon and 
Cobden at that breakfast came the commercial treaty 
between France and England which Cobden negotiated 



OF AUTOBlOGRArnY. 67 

with the Emperor m 1860. I remember dining with 
Houghton in the last-named year, on the day of the 
first great Volunteer review by the Queen, when Earl 
De Grey, then Secretary of War, under whose super- 
vision the review had been arranged and the volunteers 
organized, was one of the guests. Had he been as 
successful in arranging the terms of the treaty of 
Washinocton with reference to the Alabama Claims, 
so as to avoid the deplorable misunderstanding which 
subsequently turned a great act of peace into a fresh 
cause of contention, he would better have deserved 
his newer title of Marquis of Ripon. I remember 
another dinner at Houghton's in 1867, when I sat next 
to Gladstone, and next but one to John Bright, and 
greatly enjoyed their brilliant conversation. He gave 
me on that occasion a photograph of the little church 
at Austerfield, with the baptismal record of Governor 
Bradford, and seemed proud of being lord of the manor 
of that cradle of the Pilgrim Fathers. 

Of famous English lawyers I have known few ; but 
I might have added to my reminiscences of Brougham 
and Lyndhurst that I had been well acquainted with 
one of their great rivals at the bar and successors on 
the woolsack, John, Lord Campbell, not the least 
noticeable incident of whose remarkable career is that 
he was educated for the Presbyterian ministry. I 
knew him, however, when he was only Chancellor of 
the Duchy of Lancaster, with a seat in the House of 
Commons, and before the publication of any of those 
biographies of Chief-Justices and Chancellors, with 



68 A FRAGMENT 

which his name will always be associated, and which 
have been the subject of so much criticism. In later 
years, I have repeatedly had pleasant intercourse with 
members of his immediate family. 

Distinguished members of the medical profession 
often play an important part in London society. I 
recall pleasant dinners in 1847, at Sir James Clark's 
(then the Queen's leading physician), and at Mr. 
(afterward Sir) William Lawrence's, the distinguished 
surgeon and man of science. This last was at Ealing 
Park, near London, where Mrs. Lawrence's collection 
of orchids was one of the marvels of horticulture at 
that period. 

With Dr. (afterward Sir) Henry Holland I formed 
an agreeable intimacy when he was first in this country, 
which lasted until his death in 1873. His wife, the 
daughter of the famous wit. Rev. Sydney Smith, added 
not a little to the attractions of his well-remembered 
home in Brook Street when I first knew it. I recall 
there a marble bust of Sydney's elder brother, Robert 
Smith, familiarly called Bobus Smith, whom Dr. Hol- 
land pronounced " the most accomplished scholar and 
the most profound thinker " he had ever known. His 
name was then new to me, and, of course, made the 
stronger impression. Before my second visit to Eng- 
land, in 1859, Dr. Holland had become a baronet. He 
was a great traveller. Though devoted to the practice 
of his profession, he found time in his midsummer and 
autumn vacations for seeing many lands ; and at the 
end of his long life he had left hardly any place of 



OF AUTOBIOGKAPIIY. 69 

note imvisited. His ''Recollections of a Past Life" 
contain the story of his various journeys and voyages, 
year after year, with most interesting accounts of 
places and persons. Hardly any 'other man of his 
time could have met and known so many people worth 
meeting and knowing. Sir Henry gave me an advance 
copy of this little volume in 1868, before it was 
enlarged and published, and when he had printed only 
a few copies for his family and friends. I remember 
well how mnch it was enjoyed by Ticknor and Dr. 
Jacob Bigelow and Oliver Wendell Holmes and others 
of my friends to whom I loaned it on my return home, 
— one of whom returned it with a letter saying that 
before returning it " he had revelled in a second read- 
ing of it." Sir Henry had crossed the Atlantic seven 
times before his death, and had visited successively 
almost all parts of our land, — " travelling," as he said, 
"over nearly twenty-three thousand miles of the 
American continent." I was a fellow-passenger with 
him in 1869, and found him a brave and delightful 
companion in storm as well as in sunshine. He spent 
many days of the last week of this last visit to 
America under my roof at Brookline, — coming over 
to me from a briefer visit to our friend the late Charles 
Francis Adams, at Quincy. He was a fme scholar, and 
always travelled with a volume or two of the classics 
in his bag, to occupy and divert his spare moments. 
As he bade me good-by for the last time, he said 
quietly that he had left a little " Virgil " on the table 
in his chamber, which had been one of his pet travel- 
ling companions all the world over, for many, many 



70 A FKAGMENT 

years, and that he had not room for it in his bag any 
longer. I might say of it, as of its owner, " Multum 
ille et terris jactatus et alto." It bears the marks of 
hard usage, but is not the less interesting on that 
account. With his eldest son, the statesman and 
cabinet minister, now Lord Knutsford, and his attrac- 
tive wife, a favorite niece of Lord Macaulay, I have 
had some pleasant intercourse in later years. 

Of English prime ministers of the last half-century, 
Peel, Aberdeen, and Derby I have already mentioned. 
With Lords Russell and Beaconsfield my acquaint- 
ance was but slight. I never heard either of them 
make a speech of any importance, but I have enjoyed 
several of the latter 's witty novels. Lords Palmer- 
STON and Salisbury I knew better, having lunched 
with the latter at his famous seat of Hatfield, and 
having repeatedly attended the former's Saturday 
evening receptions. His cordial, jaunty air w^as full 
of fascination, and I could quite understand the social 
as well as political influence exercised by Lady Palmer- 
ston and himself He had the commanding presence 
and unfailing tact of Henry Clay, with, of course, 
something more of the polish of a trained courtier. 
An intense Briton, he cared little for the rights of 
other countries so he could uphold or increase the 
power and prestige of his ow^n. My interest in 
meeting him was enhanced by the recollection that he 
was the last male representative of the most distin- 
guished branch of that once numerous family of 
Temple, another branch of wdiich was represented in 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPnY. Yl 

the last century by my maternal grand Hither, Sir John 
Temple. A niece of the last-named was the grand- 
mother of an eminent Englishman who is not yet 
prime minister, but who would do honor to that 
exalted station, — the present Marquis of Dufferin, 
who has gone through a succession of great offices 
and made a distinguished mark in each one of them. 
AVherever and whenever England has looked for a 
man to meet a sudden exigency, — whether as Viceroy 
of India or ambassador at different courts, — she has 
called upon him, and never called in vain. As a 
speaker and writer, he has not a few of the charms 
of his great-grandfather, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. 
His " Letters from High Latitudes " was one of the 
wittiest books of its day ; and his social attractions 
have rendered him a delightful companion wherever 
he has been known on either continent. I recall with 
pleasure a visit of several days which he and Lady 
Dufferin paid me at Brookline when he was Governor- 
General of Canada, and I have often enjoyed his 
society in London. 

Of the new prime minister. Lord Rosebery, too, I 
have seen something on both sides of the ocean, but it 
was at an early period of his life when so distinguished 
a future could hardly have been confidently predicted 
for him. His illustrious predecessor, Gladstone, 1 
have been privileged to meet often, either at his own 
table or at the tables of others. I doubt if any man 
I ever met has impressed me more by the wealth of 
his accomplishments, by the charms of his conversa- 
tion, and by a certain transparency of character, than 



72 A FEAGMENT 

Gladstone. Yet it is often complained that no one 
can quite see through him ; and it must be confessed 
that the clearness of his ideas is sometimes obscured 
by the exuberance of his vocabulary. 

The most interesting speech I ever heard him make 
was at an evening meeting of the Society of Antiqua- 
ries. Lord Stanhope (then President of that Society) 
had given a little dinner at which Gladstone, the Duke 
of Argyll, Dr. Schliemann the explorer, Longfellow, 
and I were among the guests. After our adjournment 
to Somerset House, SchUemann proceeded to give a very 
graphic account of his then recent discoveries, illus- 
trating them with maps prepared for the occasion. 
The subject was at once familiar and fascinating to 
Gladstone, who rose after Schliemann had finished and 
spoke for nearly an hour, delighting all who listened 
to him. His has indeed been a wonderful career ; but 
while no one can have beheld without a feeling of 
admiration the physical and intellectual vigor which 
has enabled him till now to bear the brunt of parlia- 
mentary warflire, some of us, on the other hand, may 
be inclined to doubt whether his fame would not have 
been as great, or greater, if he had retired earlier 
from politics, and devoted the remainder of his life 
to literature. 

In running my eye over these desultory but by 
no means exhaustive reminiscences, I find myself con- 
tinually reminded of other valued friends of different 
periods, — such, for instance, as Dr. Vaughan, long 
Master of the Temple and now Dean of Llandaff, and 



OF AUTOBIOGRxlPHY. 73 

good Dean ITowsoN of Chester, and the lamented 
Principal Tulloch of St. Andrews, — while 1 am con- 
scious that still other names, to which I should like to 
have made passing allusion, will not occur to me until 
too late. I feel, however, that it is only grateful to 
devote a line to that kindest of hosts, Thomas Baring, 
M. P. (Tom Baring, as he was so generally called), long 
senior partner of the great house of that name, who 
might have been Chancellor of the Exchequer if he 
had chosen. Nor should I forget that accomplished 
scholar, the most amiable and unpretending of men, 
the seventh Duke of Devonshire, under whose aus- 
pices as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge I 
received the degree of Doctor of Laws in 1874, in 
company with Sir Bartle Frere, Lord Chief Justice 
Cockburn, and Lord Wolseley. His eldest son, the 
present Duke, a prime minister of the future, I also 
knew under his former title of Hartington, and have 
since had occasion to realize how much ability and 
patriotic purpose lie concealed under his apathetic 
manner and hesitating delivery. A younger brother 
of the last-named, Lord Frederick Cavendish, I 
knew much better, and there still lingers in my ears 
the cry of the newsboys under my window in London, 
in 1882, announcing his shameful murder by L'ish 
assassins, — the most brutal political crime of the nine- 
teenth century, and the untimely ending of a career 

of promise. 

If I have said nothing of three other English states- 
men of whom I have seen something at different 
times, — two of them the foremost debaters of their 



74 A FRAGMENT 

day in the Commons (Sir William Harcourt and 
Mr. Chamberlain), the other a useful member of both 
houses of ParHament in succession, and justly esteemed 
for his scientific attainments and rare social gifts 
(Lord Platfair), — it is because they have all three 
had the good taste to marry Massachusetts wives, and 
their characters and careers are as familiar in this 
country as in their own. 

I was first presented at Court in 1847. Mr. Ban- 
croft, our Minister, was unfortunately taken ill a few 
days before the Drawing-Room, and I accompanied 
Mr. Brodhead and Mr. Moran, his secretaries, having 
been admitted by Lord Palmerston to the diplomatic 
circle, where Van de Weyer, the Belgian Minister, 
took me kindly in charge. After making my bow, I 
was thus privileged to remain in the Court circle, and 
witness the presentations from beginning to end. The 
Queen was then in the full enjoyment of youth and 
health, and was surrounded by all the beauty of her 
Court, r— the Duchess of Sutherland, the Marchioness 
of Douro, and Lady Jocelyn among the most conspi- 
cuous. Prince Albert was at her side, and the young 
Grand Duke Constantine of Russia near him ; while 
the old Duke of Wellington was not far off. It was 
a splendid scene. Soon afterward I was at a ball at 
Buckingham Palace; and before leaving London, I 
attended the Birthday Drawing-Room, and was again 
witness to the grace and dignity of the Queen's 
manner. But the best opportunity I had of seeing 
and hearing her was in the House of Lords, when she 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 75 

prorogued Parliament in person. Nothing could have 
been more brilliant than that occasion, — the peers in 
their robes, the peeresses in all their jewels, floor and 
galleries crowded with all the distinction and beauty 
of the realm, the Queen herself in her state attire, 
with a crown upon her head. But more impressive 
than anything else was the distinct articulation and 
exquisite voice with which she read her speech. 
Fanny Kemble in Portia was not more effective. The 
whole scene was dramatic, and no part could have 
been better played than that of her Majesty; while 
the solemnity and sincerity of her tone sufficiently 
evinced that she was not playing a part at all, but 
discharging a duty with simple, unconscious earnest- 
ness. 

Thirteen years afterward I was at Court again, with 
our Minister, Mr. Dallas. The Queen and the Prince 
Consort had lost the freshness of youth, and gave plain 
indication that the cares of royalty had not weighed 
upon them lightly. 

Seven years later still, I accompanied Mr. Adams 
on his last attendance at a Drawing-Room. But there 
was no Queen, and no Prince Consort. The good and 
wise Prince had been dead for five or six years, and 
her Majesty had not emerged from her long mourning 
for him. Two of her daughters, with the Prince of 
Wales, took her place. The ceremony was cold and 
brief, and the Court very thinly attended. A greater 
contrast to the Drawing-Room of 1847 could not have 
been imagined. My own old Court dress, reappearing 
at the end of twenty years, seemed to me the only re- 



76 A FEAGMENT 

minder of my first presentation. But I was glad to 
have accompanied Mr. Adams, and to have witnessed 
the respect with which he was then regarded. 

Of the Peince of Wales I saw not a little when he 
was in Boston, having been on the committee for his 
reception. Longfellow and I were of the committee of 
three, with Commodore Hudson, for conducting him to 
the ball, and he was specially committed to my charge. 
The pains he took the next morning, in the Library at 
Cambridge, in returning a little pencil which he had 
borrowed of me for writing down his partners for the 
dance, and which I had told him was not worth return- 
ing, impressed me with an idea of his thoughtfulness ; 
and the interest he manifested in the autographs of 
Washington and Franklin (of which I gave him speci- 
mens, at his own suggestion, from my own family 
papers) evinced both intelligence and tact. 

It happened that Longfellow and I were standing 
together on the lawn at a garden-party at Holland 
House in 1867, when the Prince, who was among the 
guests, came up and greeted us cordially. After a little 
talk about Boston and his visit to the United States, he 
asked us to go with him and let him recall us to the 
Comte de Paris. Nothingr could have been kinder or 
more graceful than his manner. A few days later, he 
sent us a special invitation to call on him at Marlbo- 
rough House, where we spent half an hour with him. 
Ori taking leave, he excused himself for not offering us 
some more formal hospitality on account of the Princess's 
recent confinement, and said to me in parting, "Re- 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 77 

member me to all my Boston friends." Soon after- 
ward I met him at a ball at Earl Spencer's, when he 
crossed the room to shake hands with me, and presented 
me to the French Ambassador, Prince La Tour d'Au- 
vergne. I was most agreeably disappointed in his whole 
air and aspect, and entirely discredited the malicious 
gossip which prevailed about him at that time. 

Seven years later, in 1874, at a state concert in 
Buckingham Palace, I was gratified to find that he still 
remembered me, and he took pains to present both my 
wife and myself to the Princess. At a garden-party at 
Lambeth Palace not long after, he again honored me 
with some little conversation ; and he has left on my 
mind the impression of exceeding courtesy, with that 
royal gift, a good memory for faces. 

I was not less favorably impressed with Prince 
Arthue, whom I met at the funeral of George Peabody 
at Danvers, and who was among the hearers of my 
eulogy on that occasion. There was a singular grace 
and graciousness about him, and of course I could not 
but feel gratified and flattered by his asking me to send 
him (as I did) two copies of my eulogy, — " one for 
himself, and the other," as he said, " for his mother." 
Long afterward, her Majesty did me the great honor to 
send me a copy of " Our Life in the Highlands " with 
her autograph ; but I attributed this favor not to any 
merit of my own, but to my having become known to 
her as a friend of Dean Stanley and as associated by 
Mr. Peabody in some of his public benefactions. 



78 A FRAGMENT 

Crossing the Channel in June, 1847, 1 spent hardly 
more than a fortnight at that time in Paris, and saw 
but few persons. Prescott had given me a letter to 
Comte Adolphe de Circourt, who from that time 
until his death in 1879 was one of my most valued 
friends and correspondents. Speaking and writing the 
English language perfectly, he always seemed to me a 
man of the most universal knowledge and accomplish- 
ment I have ever known. He had reviewed Prescott's 
"Ferdinand and Isabella" in the Bibliotheque Univer- 
selle de Geneve, six or seven years before I knew him, 
and had greatly gratified Prescott and his friends. He 
was soon to be intrusted with an important mission to 
Berlin, and to win from Lamartine a tribute such as 
hardly any other man of his time and country has ever 
received. " This person," says Lamartine, " little known 
as yet out of the aristocratic world, a man of literature 
and learning, is M. de Circourt. He had been employed 
in diplomacy under the Restoration. The revolution of 
July had thrown him into retirement and opposition, — 
being more inclined to legitimacy than to democracy. 
He had profited by these years of seclusion to devote 
himself to studies which would have absorbed many 
men's lives, but which were only the diversions of his 
own. Languages, races, geography, history, philosophy, 
travels, constitutions, religions of people from the in- 
fancy of the world down to our own day, from Thibet 
even to the Alps, — he had incorporated them all into 
his mind; had reflected upon them all, had retained 
them all. One might question him on the universality 
of facts and ideas which make up the world, without 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 79 

his being obliged, in order to answer, to consult other 
volumes than his own memory, — an immense extent 
and surface and depth of notions, of which no one ever 
knew the bottom or the limits ; a living world-chart of 
human knowledge. . . . M. de Circourt had married a 
young Russian girl, of an aristocratic family and of a 
European spirit. Through her he had relations to all 
that was eminent in the literary or court circles of Ger- 
many and of the North." 

De Candolles, the great botanist, bears similar testi- 
mony to the marvellous acquirements and accomplish- 
ments of M. de Circourt, and gives more than one 
most striking anecdote of the young Russian girl, Ana- 
stasia de Klustein, who, when I was in Paris, had been 
the Comtesse de Circourt for many years. She was in 
some respects more remarkable even than her husband, 
with a vivacity, a hel esprit, and a charm of manner al- 
together her own. Her command of languages seemed 
almost miraculous. I have been at her salon of a morn- 
ing or an evening, and heard her converse freely in 
English, French, Italian, German, and I think Spanish 
also, besides Russian, her native tongue. She would 
toss off her questions or answers in either language in- 
differently, according to the guests who surrounded her, 
and seemed equally at home in all. The most distin- 
guished men and women of all parties united in admir- 
ing and paying homage to her. De Tocqueville and 
Lamartine and Cavour and Mignet, as well as De Can- 
dolles, bore common testimony to her attractions. 

I saw Madame de Circourt again in 1859 or 1860, 
having had more than one charming letter from her in 



80 A FRAGMENT 

the interval. A few years previously she had been 
terribly burned, and was now an invalid and a great 
sufferer ; but her physicians permitted her to receive 
a few friends twice a week, in the morning or evening. 
Lying on a little sofa, with an anodyne at her side 
which she occasionally sipped to alleviate anguish, her 
conversation was as bright and sparkling as it had been 
thirteen years before, and her repartees in every tongue 
had lost nothing of their point and pungency. A more 
heroic endurance of suffering I have never imagined. 
But a few years more brought it to an end ; and her 
husband long lived alone in his little villa at La Celle 
St. Cloud, the neighborhood of which during the war 
with Prussia became the scene of conflict, and its sur- 
roundings were greatly changed by the cannon of 
contending forts and armies. The desolation of his 
home and the disasters of his country alike bore 
heavily upon him. 

Circourt was never elected to the French Academy. 
His writings, voluminous as they were in amount, have 
never taken the form of a volume. Essays and reviews, 
contributed to periodical journals and never collected, 
occupied his life. Not a few of them have related to 
America or Americans. Prescott's "Ferdinand and 
Isabella," Bancroft's " History of the United States," 
Kirke's "Charles the Bold," Parkman's "Jesuits in 
Canada," Motley's "Dutch Republic" too, if I mistake 
not, Ticknor's " Life of Prescott," and my own " Life 
and Letters of John Winthrop," have been the subject 
of elaborate treatment at his hands. Had he devoted 
himself to a single work, he could not have failed to 



OF AUTOBIOGRAniy. 81 

achieve a fame which these desultory labors have not 
won, though, after all, perhaps these have been more 
useful to his fellow-men. 

Circourt introduced me to Mignet, the historian. 
Perpetual Secretary of the Institute of Moral and 
Political Sciences. With him 1 attended an Annual 
Seance of the Institute, and heard Mignet deliver his 
commemorative discourse on Ancillon, the eminent 
Prussian statesman and philosopher. The scene was 
very striking. The little hall of the Institute was 
crowded ; and a guard of soldiers with muskets not 
only kept the doors, but were in the very aisles. 
Some thirty of the most noted literary men of France 
were in their seats as members, the officers of the 
Institute wearing green embroidered uniforms, with 
swords and clmpeaux. Mignet, in uniform as Secre- 
tary, took his seat at the desk in front of the President 
and delivered, or rather read, his discourse ex cathedra 
His reading, however, with occasional gestures, was 
exquisite. A very handsome man, — " le beau Mignet," 
as he was justly called, — his voice was charming ; and 
Everett himself could not have given more effect to 
the performance. He was then in the freshness of his 
manhood. I heard him again in 1860, at the same 
place, on a similar occasion, and with the same sur- 
roundings, deliver, or read, his discourse on Count 
Portalis. Thirteen years had left little mark on either 
figure or voice, and I had a renewed impression of the 
exceeding beauty and grace of his manner. Disliking 
the Empire and the Emperor, he omitted no opportu- 

6 



/I 



82 A FRAGMENT 

nity darkly to intimate his dislike, and to make promi- 
nent whatever in the career of Portalis had been 
hostile to the Imperial policy. The occasion was thus 
made a little exciting, and there were rumors after- 
w^ard that a catdion, if nothing more, would be issued by 
the Imperial Police against such utterances. 

I saw Mignet repeatedly at his own house and at my 
hotel, and was deeply impressed with the brilliancy of 
his conversation. In talking with him about Dupan- 
loup, then Bishop of Orleans, whose speeches and 
letters I had read with admiration, he said, " Have 
you read his Eloge on General La Moriciere ? There 
is nothing finer since Bossuet." I had an opportunity 
of reading it shortly afterward, and found it as elo- 
quent as Mignet had described. 

I saw him again in 1867, when he had been very ill, 
and exhibited the marks of increasing infirmities. He 
was obliged to give up his Annual Discourse, or I 
should have heard him a third time. He sent me 
copies of his Eloges on De Tocqueville and Macaulay, 
and gave me his two volumes of Discourses, including 
an elaborate and admirable "Notice of Franklin." 

I saw a good deal of him again in 1874 and 1875, 
dining with him and Barthelemy St. Hilaire in the 
latter year at Thiers's table ; and on my last visit to 
Paris, in 1882, I found him genial and cordial as ever, 
engaged in historical composition at the great age of 
eighty-six. 

Besides the two seances of the Institute which I have 
mentioned, I was fortunate in being present at two 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 83 

others, — one in 1874, when De Lomenie's description 
of Mirabeau was very dramatic ; the other in 1882, 
when, by the kindness of Barthelemy St. Hilaire, I 
assisted at the memorable reception of Cherbuhez by 
Ernest Renan and heard eloquent addresses from 
both. 

I heard Guizot make an eloquent speech from the 
Tribune of the Chamber of Deputies in 1817, but did 
not make his acquaintance until many years later, 
when we met repeatedly. Calling upon him at the 
close of 1859, he said, — 

" Have you anything new this morning?" 

" Nothing," I replied, " but the sudden death of 
Macaulay, as announced by telegraph from London." 

''Macaulay dead!" he exclaimed. "He was my 
best friend in England ; " and he could hardly conceal 
or contain his emotion. 

Guizot spoke English perfectly, but Thiers not a 
word. If he could speak a word, he never would. I 
had taken a letter and parcel for him from London to 
Paris from William Bingham Baring, afterward second 
Lord Ashburton, who made me promise to leave my 
own card with them. The card of Thiers was imme- 
diately returned ; and soon afterward Mr. Martin, then 
our Charge d' Affaires, accompanied me to a reception 
at his house in Place St. George, subsequently destroyed 
by the Communists. Thiers was very cordial ; but 
finding that my French would hardly hoki out for 
a political discussion, he passed me on politely to 
his wife, who spoke English fluently. I was again at 



84 A FRAGMENT 

his house in 1867, and while waiting for him to 
come in, I had a good chance to observe the beauty 
of his pictures and objects of art, so many of which 
the Communists have destroyed or ruined. I heard 
him in the Chamber, too, more than once, in rejDly to 
Rouher, and during some of the most exciting debates 
on the Roman question and other agitating subjects. 
I shall never forget his exclamation, twice repeated 
with the most passionate emphasis : " Soyons Fran^ais ! 
Soyons Fran^ais ! " The pitch of enthusiasm to which 
the Chamber rose at that moment exceeded anything 
I had ever witnessed in a so-called deliberative body. 
But the Chamber was always in a state of excitement, 
and often of confusion, during the debates in those last 
years of the Empire; and a stranger would have 
thought that they might pass from words to blows at 
any moment. Yet Rouher maintained a comparative 
tranquillity and dignity of manner, and had a certain 
'po8e^ when he ascended the tribune, which recalled 
Webster's manner to me. Thiers more than once 
reminded me of John Quincy Adams in some of his 
most violent moods during the antislavery debates 
in Congress. I was greatly inijDressed by the fire of 
French eloquence at that time. When Thiers sent 
me a copy of his most elaborate speech, I little 
imagined how soon he Avould be ruling the destinies 
of a French republic ; but quite as little had I imag- 
ined, in 1847, how soon Louis Philippe would be 
dethroned, and be succeeded, after a brief republican 
interregnum, by an Emperor. 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 85 

I was presented to Louis Philippe by Mr. Martin, 
our Charge d'Affaires (after Mr. King of Alabama had 
left Paris, and before Mr. Rush had arrived), at the 
Palace of Neuilly. It was a quiet evening reception, 
and I was invited, out of regular course, as a mem- 
ber of Cono-ress. The British Ambassador (Lord 
Normanby) and Leverrier, then in the first flush of 
his celebrity as the discoverer of the new planet, 
were almost the only visitors besides myself and Mr. 
Martin. There were two or three aides-de-camp in 
uniform ; but the King was in plain clothes, and the 
Queen and Madame Adelaide and the Duchess of 
Orleans were sitting at a little table, sipping their 
tea and then turning to their embroidery. Nothing 
could have been more simple and unaffected than the 
manners of them all. The Duchess of Orleans, with 
whom I conversed most, was particularly graceful and 
gracious, and gave me an impression of goodness 
and loveliness which was fully confirmed by her Life 
and Letters, as published after her death. Her son, 
the Comte de Paris, was a little boy then, and had 
doubtless gone to bed ; but I have known him since 
in London and in Boston, and he has been good 
enough to send nie his volume on the Trades-Unions 
of England, and his valuable History of our Civil War. 
He has always impressed me as the wortli}^ son of so 
excellent a mother. Louis Philippe himself was 
cordial and chatty, asking after Americans whom he 
had known when in the United States as an exile. 
" Did you know Tim Pickering ? " said he, and then 
went on to say more than 1 can remember of him and 



86 A FRAGMENT 

others of our old-time statesmen. He followed me 
almost to the door of the room, in the easiest way, 
when I took my leave, and told me emphatically that 
I must come and see him again. Mr. Martin said 
this was a royal command, and must be obeyed ; 
and so the next week I went again, — this time in 
plain clothes, for I was in uniform before. Another 
conversation with the Duchess of Orleans renewed 
my impression of the sweetness and sincerity of her 
manner and character; and the King was as jaunty 
and as cordial as before. In seven or eight months 
more, he and his family were banished from France, 
and the palace in which I had seen them was sacked 
and burned. 

My pleasant associations with the royal family of 
Orleans w^ere revived and intensified thirty-five years 
later, in September, 1882, by being privileged, through 
the kind offices of M. Laugel, to lunch with that dis- 
tinguished soldier and historical writer, the Due 
d'Aumale, at his well-known Chateau of Chantilly, 
where he was good enough to show me in person many 
of the priceless works of art which it contains. 

Of Lamartine, whose three months of power suc- 
ceeded the downfall of the Orleans dynasty, and whose 
eloquence arrested the madness of the Red Republi- 
cans of that period, I saw nothing in 1847. But having 
alluded to him, in July, 1848, in my oration on laying 
the corner-stone of the monument to Washington, as 
Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United 
States, I received from him a letter of acknowledg- 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPUY. 87 

merit which was very characteristic, and is worthy of 
a place here : — 

Pakis, 9 Sept. 1848. 

Monsieur, — Les co7-des magiques m'ont apport^ le mag- 
nifique fragment de votre discours, ou mon nom bien iudigne 
d'un pareil honneur est associd par vous a la mdmoire de 
Washington. Cette allusion m'a ^t^ d'autant plus douce en 
ce moment, que jc me trouve dans ma patrie sous la poids 
d'une immense depression, consequent d'une immense erreur 
sur les motifs de ma conduite politique, apres que j'ai et^ 
assez heureux pour contribuer a remcttre cette patrie sauv^e 
dans les mains de I'Assemblde Nationale. J'ai trop lu et 
trop ecrit I'histoire pour m'etonner d'un mal entendu 
d'opinion, ni meme pour m'affliger d'une persecution morale. 
Je sais corabien I'humanite est susceptible d'erreur, et 
quelquefois meme avide d'ingratitude. Neanmoins je vous 
remercie d'avoir envoys avec votre discours ici un certain 
remords a quelques-uns de mes compatriotes. La justice 
qui vient de loin est celle qui arrive la premiere, parce que 
elle est ordinairement la plus impartiale. 11 y a cependant 
une bien grande partialite dans vos paroles sur moi ; mais 
c'est la partialite de la bienveillance qui unit entre eux a 
travers I'oc^an les republicains du meme cocur. C'est de 
cette partialite, Monsieur, que je devois me plaindre, car elle 
m'ecrase en me louant. Je n'en ai pas la force. Jc saisis au 
contraire avec empressement ce prdtexte pour vous addresser 
non seulement ma reconnaissance, mais mon admiration 
desinteressde pour votre discours, qui sera aussi un monu- 
ment h, I'Amerique, a la vraie libertd, et a Washington. 

Recevez, Monsieur, mes respectucux et affectueux compli- 
ments, 

Lamartine, 

Representant du Peuple. 
A I'honorable Robert Winthrop, 

President de la Chambre de Eepresentants. 



88 A FKAGMENT 

On one of my next visits to Paris, in 1859 or 1860, I 
eagerly complied with the invitation of Lamartine, 
through a friend, and passed an evening at his house. 
There was something more than usually interesting in 
his appearance, and his voice was exceedingly rich. 
As he walked the room, conversing, or rather solilo- 
quizing, in the most emphatic and almost impassioned 
manner, his vibratory tones combined with his tall 
figure, and a somewhat dictatorial manner, to remind 
me of some scenes between Mr. Clay and myself at 
Washington. Unfortunately, he either could not or 
would not speak a word of English, albeit his wife 
was an Englishwoman. His remarks in regard to the 
United States, and particularly on the subject of 
slavery, were by no means agreeable to me, and I was 
roused to muster up all my resources in reply. I think 
I can safely say that I talked more bad French that 
night to the poet-statesman of France than I had ever 
done before, or than I have ever done since, to any 
one. The failure of his subscription-list in America 
had greatly disappointed him ; and his own downfall, 
after so brief a term of authority, had served to sour 
him generally. Yet I have found much to admire in 
Lamartine's genius and heroism, and I was charmed 
with some parts of his conversation that evening. We 
parted most amicably, and he soon afterward called 
upon me at my hotel ; but I was out, and saw him no 
more. 

1 have already mentioned having met Napoleon 
III. in London in 1847. I breakfasted with him at 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 89 

Monckton Milnes's, lunched with him at Miss Burdett- 
Coutts's, dined with him at Joshua Bates's, and we 
exchanged cards. There was an air of modest reti- 
cency about him then, which was quite attractive. 
At Miss Burdett-Coutts's he was accompanied by Doctor 
Conneau, and by the dog which had been a party to 
his escape from the prison at Ham. On my return to 
London in 1859, at a matinee at Miss Burdett-Coutts's, 
the first person I was presented to at the head of the 
stairs, on entering, was the Comte de Paris, then an 
exile ; while, on crossing the Channel again, I found 
Louis Napoleon, the exile of 1847, on the throne ! 
No Court receptions were then being held, but at the 
suffsrestion of a former French Minister to the United 
States, who had known me as Speaker and Senator, 
I wrote a note to Mocquard, the private secretary of 
the Emperor, expressing a disposition to wait upon his 
Majesty. Meantime, however, our Secretary of Lega- 
tion, Mr. Calhoun (then acting as Charge d'Affaires), 
had sent in my name ; but delays, resulting from the 
state of public affairs, prevented any appointment for 
an audience reaching me until I had gone a day's 
journey on my way to Ital}^ 

In 1868, 1 was more fortunate, and through the kind- 
ness of General Dix — at that time our Minister to 
France — had the pleasure of accompanying him to 
one of the jjeUts liindis of the Empress. Beautiful she 
certainly was that evening, and singularly graceful 
and winning. In alluding to my country and country- 
men, she gave me a chance to name Washington 
Irving, who had often told me of his intimacy in her 



90 A FRAGMENT 

family, and that he had had the Empress as a child on 
his knee. I did not, of course, go into such particu- 
lars ; but she instantly caught at his name, saying, 
"And did you know Washington Irving? And was 
he a friend of yours ? He was a delightful person and 
a delightful writer ! " On the Emperor saying to me 
rather significantly, " You have been in Europe before, 
M. Winthrop," I said that I could not forget having 
met his Majesty at Mr. Bates's in London, twenty 
years before. " Oh, yes ! and what a good man Mr. 
Bates was ! " said he. " And what a good American ! " 
he immediately added. Thus I had elicited imperial 
compliments for two of my countrymen, and was 
content. 

The scene was a magnificent one, without the pomp 
and ceremony of a grand reception, but also without 
its crowd and confusion. After the first formal entree, 
the Emperor and Empress moved freely about among 
their guests, and every one was put at his ease. The 
music, the toilettes, the flowers, the supper, were all 
exquisite ; but I had witnessed a still more magnifi- 
cent pageant of the Empire a few months before, when 
I was present at the opening of the Chambers at the 
beginning of the New Year. That was a state cere- 
mony, like the one I had witnessed in London in 1847, 
and I hardly know which was the more imposing, — 
the opening of the French Chambers by the Emperor, 
or the prorogation of Parliament by the Queen. The 
Emperor at sixty could hardly be expected to deliver 
his speech as gracefully as the Queen at twenty-five, 
but he pronounced it distinctly and bore himself with 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 91 

great propriety and dignity. All the high officers of 
the court and the army were present, with the Empress 
and her ladies of honor, and the Prince Imperial and 
all the imperial family, making a superb spectacle. 
How little did those who witnessed it, or those who 
participated in it, dream of the reverses which France 
and its imperial rulers were so soon to undergo! I 
have always thought it noble of Napoleon III. to avow 
his personal responsibility for the surrender at Sedan, 
nor can I doubt that the reasons he assigned for order- 
ino- the surrender were sufficient; but the war with 
Prussia was a terrible mistake, if it could have been 
avoided. Yet if there had been no Sedan, the war 
might have been esteemed wise, or certainly would 
have been called so. 

Of his successors at the helm of France (besides Thiers, 
whom I have already mentioned) I have been received 
at the Elysee by both Presidents Macmahon and Grevy, 
while I had the good fortune to meet Gambetta after 
his fall from power. Marshal Macmahon impressed me 
as a courteous, high-minded soldier ; Grevy as rather a 
homespun person with but little conversation ; Gam- 
betta I found much more of a gentleman than I 
expected, with a wonderful voice, a striking carriage, 
and an air of conscious strength. 

But for the risk of becoming tedious, I might easily 
mention other Parisian celebrities, of less historical 
importance, with whom at different periods I have been 
brought into contact, and some of whom I met at the 
well-known receptions of Madame Moiil. I content 



92 A FRAGMENT 

myself, however, with briefly alluding to several oppor- 
tunities I enjoyed of appreciating the charm of French 
rural life. I had long been no stranger to English 
country-houses ; but it was not until 1882 that I had 
an opportunity of comparing them with French ones, 
having in that year passed a few pleasant days with 
the Marquis de Rochambeau at his ancestral chateau 
near Vendome, where I occupied the tapestried bed- 
room of the Marechal de Rochambeau of Revolutionary 
memory, which contained a portrait of Washington, 
given by himself My agreeable acquaintance with 
the present Marquis, dated from the previous year, 
when he had come to America as an invited guest at 
the ceremonies attending the centennial anniversary 
of the surrender at Yorktown, on which occasion I had 
delivered a commemorative address by appointment 
of Congress. The official deputation from France, by 
the way, included General Boulanger, whose con- 
versation did not then suggest to me or others that he 
was a man of much capacity, but whose subsequent 
meteoric career and tragic end are too familiar to 
require comment. 

A few weeks later, I had another pleasant visit, 
this time in Normandy, at the country-seat of the 
retired ambassador De Corcelle, a man full of inter- 
esting reminiscence, his wife the granddaughter of 
Lafayette, a fine portrait of whom, by Ary Scheffer, 
was one of the principal ornaments of the house. The 
neighboring country was beautiful ; and among the 
places I was taken to was Bois Roussel, the seat oi 
De Corcelle's nephew. Count Roederer, a great French 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 93 

agriculturist and breeder of race-horses. Another orig- 
inal portrait of Lafayette, together with much of his 
library, I saw while lunching at his former country- 
house, the Chateau de la Grange, then occupied by 
the venerable Count de Lasteyiue, who with other 
members of his family received me very kindly. Ma- 
dame de Lasteyrie seemed to me quite the most 
attractive old French lady I had met. 

Of Continental celebrities, other than French ones, I 
have known comparatively few. It so happens that my 
visits to Berlin have been to enable some member of my 
family to consult an oculist, at times when the Court 
was absent, and I have thus never met Bismarck. I 
had a letter to Humboldt, but he died before I could 
deliver it ; though I had previously received a kind 
note from him. Some one had sent him a copy of my 
lecture on " Archimedes and Franklin," on which he 
had made some comments in a letter to Varnhagen 
von Ense, which has since been published. I thus 
had to content myself with visiting his apartment, from 
which I brought back to Louis Agassiz one of the 
palms borne by students at his funeral. On the bed 
on which he died, were some reproductions of Ililde- 
brand's well-known water-color of Humboldt in his 
library, one of which I had framed as a souvenir. 

In Vienna, I have been more fortunate, though when 
I first went there, in 1859, the great men of the empire 
were mostly dead, Metternich, for instance, having died 
in the preceding June. I have, however, known at 



94 A FRAGMENT 

different times three Austrian Prime Ministers, von 
Rechberg, von Beust, and von Buol-Schauenstein, 
the last-named a very attractive and interesting person. 
At a banquet in Vienna in honor of the hundredth 
anniversary of Schiller's birthday, I met Count Thun 
and other high officials, to say nothing of some poets 
and savants whose names I should now have some diffi- 
culty in recalling ; and at Dr. Jager's I met Prince 
Schwarzenberg, though the doctor himself, who had 
been the physician and friend of Metternich, was the 
more entertaining person of the two. Nor should I 
forget that I was invited by the aged Prince Esterhazy 
to his splendid palace, when he talked much of Wash- 
ington Irving and of Edward Everett, both of whom he 
had known when Ambassador in London. 

My old friend. Senator Seward, was with me during 
part of my visit to Vienna in the autumn of 1859, and 
our Minister, Mr. Glancy Jones, obtained for us a pri- 
vate audience of the Emperor, a rare favor at that time. 
It was stipulated that the conversation should be in 
German or French, and of course we chose French as 
the least unfamiliar tongue of the two. Seward, how- 
ever, with commendable precaution, resolved to study 
his phrases in advance, and prepared for the occasion a 
little opening speech, concerning the accuracy of which 
he consulted my daughter the evening before ; and she, 
fresh from her Ollendorff, revised it for him, greatly to 
our amusement. 

At noon the next day, in evening dress, we drove 
together to the palace in Mr. Jones's carriage, though 
neither he nor his secretary was permitted to accompany 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 95 

US. We were ushered to a large ante-chamber in which 
some of the Hungarian Guard were on duty, one of 
them standing at the door of the next room with a 
drawn sword. Presently an aide-de-camp came from 
it, and took back our names. In a few moments he re- 
appeared and conducted us to the imperial presence. 
Francis Joseph was in a room of moderate size, in the 
corner of which was a working-desk with a single chair, 
from which he rose to receive us. It was evident that 
no one was to sit there in his presence, as there were 
no other chairs. The aide-de-camp disappeared ; and 
Seward launched out at once into his little speech, but 
bungled and broke down in the middle of it. By way 
of rallying his resources, it occurred to him to offer con- 
gratulation on the recent ratification of the treaty of 
peace with France, and I thought the Emperor seemed 
to wince at such a reminder of his reverses in Lombardy. 
I came to the rescue with a word or two about Maria 
Theresa and some other of the historic glories of Aus- 
tria. The Emperor then asked a few simple questions 
about our country and ourselves, and soon signified by 
a bow that our audience was at an end. He was in un- 
dress uniform, perfectly natural and unaffected, and I 
was agreeably disappointed by his apparent intelligence 
and energy. 

I saw him again, reviewing a noble body of cavalry, 
and surrounded by a brilliant staff in every variety of 
superb costume. I saw him still again at a concert 
given in honor of the Schiller Anniversary, in one of 
the halls of the palace. It was a magnificent entertain- 
ment, — the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, with Scliil- 



96 A FEAGMENT 

ler's Song of Joy, performed by a select orchestra of one 
hundred, with the aid of the soloists and chorus of the 
Imperial Opera troupe. The symphony was preceded 
by the recitation of some of Schiller's most celebrated 
odes by the great actors of Germany. I had Lord 
Lytton's admirable version of the odes in my hand, and 
was thus enabled to appreciate them the better. The 
Empress sat with her husband in a low gallery at our 
side, and fulfilled all our expectations by her exceeding 
grace and beauty. 

I have never visited Russia, but I have seen a good 
deal of Russian diplomates in different parts of the 
world, and I was intimate with Alexander de Bodisco, 
who was for nearly twenty years Minister at Wash- 
ington, and did so much to create a friendly feeling 
between the two countries. He delighted in bringing 
together at his sumptuous table leading men of all 
parties and sections, and did what he could (aided by 
his handsome American wife) to soften the asperities 
and animosities of political controversy. 

Bodisco was a character in his way, with a great 
love of dress, and when he gave a grand ball some- 
times wore in succession two showy uniforms in the 
course of the same evening. Washington was then 
a comparatively small place, but questions connected 
with official precedence were as troublesome as they 
often have been since. Ex-President John Quincy 
Adams, Senator Benton, and others of the old school, 
were wont strenuously to contend that the Speaker 
of the House, as third officer of the nation, should 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 97 

outrank both the Chief-Justice and the Secretary of 
State. Accordingly, Bodisco, at an entertainment given 
by him in honor of the marriage of a favorite niece, 
assigned to me (as Speaker) the duty of leading the 
way to supper. This proceeding manifestly annoyed 
James Buchanan, then Secretary of State and after- 
ward President, who was also one of the guests, and 
whom Bodisco vainly attempted to appease by handing 
him a knife and requesting him to take the initiative. 
in cuttino; the bride-cake ! 

Some three and twenty years later I had the honor 
of presiding at a banquet given to a younger brother 
of the present Czar, the Grand Duke Alexis, who 
impressed me as a man of intelligence and accomplish- 
ment, with a singularly genial and attractive address. 
I met him afterward in London, and was reminded 
that, nearly thirty years before, I had been a privileged 
spectator of a review of the Household troops by his 
uncle, the Grand Duke Constantine, who was accom- 
panied on horseback by Prince Albert, the great Duke 
of Wellington, and a numerous staff, while the royal 
children were to be seen watching the parade from 
a window in the Horse Guards. 

I was first presented to Pius IX. in 1860. The late 
Bishop Fitzpatrick, of Boston, had given me a friendly 
and flattering letter to Cardinal Antonelli, and I was 
granted a private audience. The American Minister, 
Mr. Stockton, accompanied me ; and we were ushered 
into the Pope's private room, where he was sitting 
in his white flannel or merino robe, with a beautiful 



98 A FRAGMENT 

crucifix and a jewelled snuff-box on the table at his 
side. 

Immediately on our entrance, his Holiness said 
to me in French, " Vous avez ete President de la 
Chambre et Senateur?" and on my replying affir- 
matively, he continued, " Asseyez-vous, Monsieur," and 
then launched out into a most excited discourse on the 
then threatened removal of the French troops from 
Rome. He spoke altogether in French, and talked 
freely and fluently on public affairs on both sides of 
the ocean. In the course of his remarks upon America 
as " a great country, of great destinies, and enjoying 
a great liberty," I reminded him that he was the first 
and only Pontiff who had ever crossed the ocean. 
He said it was true that as a young priest he had 
been in Chili, and no other Pope had gone so far ; but 
he did not know what might happen hereafter. " We 
are in the midst of great events, great changes. I rest 
tranquil," said he, "amid them all, trusting in God. 
I have no ambition of earthly sovereignty, and am 
content to part with temporal power whenever God 
so wills it. But I do not wish, nor is it my duty, to 
accept the decrees of mortal kings or emperors as 
indications or instruments of God's will." 

He more than intimated his belief that the Emperor 
of the French had already, at that very moment, given 
orders to Marshal Vaillant to withdraw his troops from 
Italy. Mr. Stockton suggested that it was probably 
only from the north of Italy. The Pope replied that 
he supposed the troops might not be removed quite so 
summarily from Rome ; the Emperor ought certainly 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 99 

to give more than two hours' notice, — a week or two 
was the least that should be given. But he was not 
altogether at the mercy of foreign troops, and he 
trusted all would be safe whether they went or stayed. 
And then he made an eloquent and impassioned allu- 
sion to the exquisite fresco of Heliodorus by Raphael, 
and to the intervention of a Divine Protector portrayed 
in that grand picture. Nothing could have been more 
impressive than this part of his conversation, and I 
regret that I cannot recall more of it. He spoke with 
great approbation of a recent speech or letter of the 
late Archbishop Hughes, and of some manifestation 
which he himself had just received from Buffalo. But 
he seemed not to know exactly where Buffalo was, 
until I referred to it as being not far from the great 
Falls of Niagara. He spoke most gratefully of the 
sympathy which had been manifested for Rome, not 
merely by Catholics, but by Protestants throughout 
the world, alluding particularly — if I mistake not — 
to some recent act of the Grand Duchess of Mecklen- 
burg, among others. 

Rome was at that time in a state of great agitation. 
There were daily rumors that the French garrison was 
to be at once removed. It was thought that the Pope 
might be obliged to fly, and now and then it was 
even foolishly suggested that he might go to America. 
Garibaldi was at work in the south of Italy. France, 
having concluded her war with Austria, was taking 
possession of Savoy. Sardinia was annexing Tuscany. 
The Roman police were repeatedly in collision with the 
people ; and I was witness to at least one encounter 



100 A FKAGMENT 

when more than a hundred persons were wounded. 
The excommunication of Victor Emmanuel was de- 
cided on ; and a few weeks later I saw it placarded 
on the doors of St. Peter's. 

In 1868, I had another private interview with Pius 
IX. in company with the late George Peabody, for 
whom it was arranged by Mr. Hooker. Age had 
made its mark on him in the interval ; and the con- 
versation turned principally on works of charity and 
philantln'opy, for which Mr. Peabody had become so 
celebrated. He bade us both sit down, and exhibited 
great interest in asking about Mr. Peabody's age, and 
in learning the extent of his benefactions, readily 
assenting to the suggestion that he should add his 
autograph to several fine imperial photographs of him- 
self, and writing a sentence of the Bible upon three of 
them for Mr. Peabody, of which one was for me, and 
is now in my possession. 

At both the periods above mentioned, I was again 
formally presented to his Holiness with the ladies of my 
party on Palm Sunday, and was uniformly impressed 
with the grace, dignity, and eminent benignity of his 
appearance and manner. I saw him also at a distance, 
in great ceremonials at St. Peter's, when the pomp and 
paraphernalia seemed as oppressive to him as they were 
to all beholders. If he was artful, as was sometimes 
said by his enemies, he had certainly acquired the " ars 
celare artem." He looked simple, humble, devout. 

Not so Antoxelli, with whom I was closeted twice 
in the little room next to the reception-room, in which 
" Chastity triumphing over temptation " is the subject 



OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 101 

of a large and very suggestive German picture. He 
was a person of great fascination for man or woman, 
with an eye of fire, and an affability of the most 
seducing sort. One needed not to be with him an 
hour to understand that everything at Rome, reli- 
gious and secular, hinged on him, though he was adroit 
enough to make the Pope feel that his part as Premier 
was merely ministerial. He seemed the very imper- 
sonation of intrigue, political and social, with ability 
and hahilite equal to any emergency. 

Amono; other cardinals I met were Bedini, who had 
come over as a legate to the United States, and whom 
I knew at that time, and Altieri, for whom I con- 
ceived a high opinion as an amiable and accomplished 
person. The latter nobly exposed himself in taking 
care of the poor during a cholera panic. 

I remember hearing Pere Hyacinthe preach elo- 
quently at the French church in Rome. He aftei'- 
ward passed two or three days with me at Brookline, 
since he made so bold a stand against Ultramontanism 
and Papal Infallibility. One of the most interesting 
conversations I ever listened to occurred at my own 
table between him and Louis Agassiz, on the sub- 
ject of the unity of the human race and the Bible 
history of creation. He impressed me as a modest, 
amiable man, with a good deal of genius, much earnest 
faith, and great eloquence, but with hardly energy 
enough to take the lead in a new Reformation. 



102 A FRAGMENT 

I paid several visits to Rome at long intervals ; and 
though my time there was chiefly devoted to art, I 
had opportunities of mingling in society at some great 
houses. I recall, in particular, a splendid entertain- 
ment given by Prince Doria on the marriage of his 
daughter, and brilhant receptions at the Colonna 
Palace, where the Due de Grammont, the Comte de 
Sartiges, and the Marquis de Noailles were succes- 
sively in official residence as Ambassadors of France. 
The recent death of the hospitable and much lamented 
wife of my compatriot and friend, the sculptor Story, 
has reminded me how often I have been privileged to 
meet distinguished or agreeable people in their spa- 
cious apartment in the Barberini Palace. 

Of local Italian celebrities, the two I knew best 
were that accomplished scholar and profound student 
of Dante, the blind Duke of Sermoneta, and the emi- 
nent archseologist, Visconti, who was kind enough to 
point out to me in person numerous objects of interest, 
and to explain many curious things not within reach 
of the ordinary tourist. Sermoneta was head of the 
great house of Caetani, the most ancient of the Roman 
nobility; but this did not prevent him from being a 
leader of the progressive party, with a much greater 
love for exquisite design than for old forms and faiths, 
and with eyes wide open to everything new in litera- 
ture and government. No greater contrast could be 
imagined than that which existed between him and the 
head of another great Roman family to whom I owed 
much kindness, Prince Massimo, the alleged descendant 
of Fabius Maximus, intelligent, accomplished, but full 



OF AUTOBIOGEAPHT. 103 

of superstitious reverence for traditions, and an un- 
questioning devotee of the Papacy. I sometimes 
thought that a compromise of their two natures and 
characters would make the best type of a Roman 
citizen in those days. 

Far the most interesting man I met during my first 
visit to Florence, in 1860, was the blind Gino Capponi, 
alike distinguished as a scholar and a patriot, whose 
ancestor of the same name in the Middle Ages had also 
been a leader of the popular party. 

I have mentioned having seen the excommunication 
of Victor Emmanuel placarded on the outer walls of 
St. Peter's. He soon afterward entered Florence in 
triumph, and I was presented to him at a ball at the 
Pitti Palace. I met him seven years later at an enter- 
tainment given by the municipality of Florence in honor 
of the marriage of Prince Humbert and the beautiful 
Princess Marguerite of Savoy. A man of coarse mould 
and coarser habits of life, Victor Emmanuel looked gal- 
lant and brave as Caesar, impatient of all observances 
and conventionalities, and sometimes breathing defiance 
to all about him. In the ball-room at the Pitti, hedged 
around by officers and ladies of his court, he seemed 
like a wild boar at bay. But he had a great part to 
play ; and he played it with more moderation than 
might have been expected from such a purely animal 
nature. Amadeus, his second son, who died after hav- 
ing been for a short time King of Spain, whom I saw 
at the head of a tournament, gave pleasing indica- 
tions of intelligence and modesty, and exhibited both 
gallantry and grace. 



104 A FKAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

I had a piece of rare good-fortune in seeing Cavour 
at Turin in 1860. Madame de Circourt had given me 
a note to him, and I found him just forming a new 
Cabinet of which he had been appointed Premier. As 
he could not receive me at the moment, he wrote at 
once to invite me to the Foreign Office the next 
morning, where I spent an hour with him. He was 
most cordial and charming, and gave me a full impres- 
sion of one whose loss to Italy was to be irreparable, 
as indeed it soon proved to be, for he died in the 
following year, leaving no one who could adequately 
supply his place. 

With him I close the list of Continental celebrities 
whom I have known. As I look back upon my 
acquaintance with them, Cavour seems to me to have 
been, all things considered, the wisest and greatest 
of them all. 




Addresses and Speeches by Hon. Robert C. 
WiNTHROP on Various Occasious: 1835-1886. 
In four volumes. 8vo. Little, Brown, & Co., 
Boston. 

Life and Letters of John Winthrop, Governor 
of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. 1588-1649. 
By Hon. Robert C. Winthrop. In two vol- 
umes. 8vo. Little, Brown, & Co., Boston. 

Washington, Bowdoin, and Franklin, as por- 
trayed in Occasional Addre.sses. By Hon. 
Robert C. Winthrop. 8vo. Little, Brown, 
& Co., Boston. 



